


Zeitgeist

by corgasbord



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon Non-Binary Character, Multi, i don't feel like tagging every relationship here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-01-23 02:44:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 21,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21312865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corgasbord/pseuds/corgasbord
Summary: No matter where or when they appear, Nobunaga will always think of themselves the same way: a product of their time, as much a human as they are a demon.-A collection of Nobunaga-centric drabbles.Nobu & Mori - 1 / Maou/Majin - 2, 7, 19, 27 / Kippoushi/Okita - 3, 11, 16, 29 / Nobu & Nobukatsu - 4 / Nobu/Okita - 5, 6, 12, 18 / Nobu/Kagetora - 8 / Kippoushi & Billy - 9 / Maou/Okita - 10, 14, 23, 30 / Maou & Lobo - 13 / Kippoushi & Kagetora - 15 / The Odas - 17 / Kippoushi & Chacha - 20 / Kippoushi & Nobukatsu - 21 / Maou & Mori - 22 / Nobu/MHX - 24 / Kippoushi/Majin - 25 / Nobu & Hijikata - 26 / Kippoushi & Mori - 28
Relationships: Oda Nobunaga | Archer/Okita Souji | Sakura Saber
Comments: 6
Kudos: 68





	1. Nobu & Mori - A Helping Hand

**Author's Note:**

> in case it wasn't obvious yet who my absolute favorite character of all time is, i present to you all the fruits of my labor: nobunaga november.
> 
> this started out because i joked about writing a nobu drabble for every day of november and then ended up... actually doing it. whoops. but this has been a fun commitment so i'm seeing it through to the end, and i hope there's a little something in here for all kinds of nobu fans to enjoy!

Mori’s previous lord was always good at projecting an aura that offset her stature. She was dignified, to be sure, serious almost every moment the two spent together. That never bothered him. If anything, it was something worthy of praise.

It does, however, leave him woefully unprepared to see her with her toes planted in the seat of a kitchen chair, body lifted as high as she can manage to reach for the uppermost shelf of a cabinet.

“Ootono?” he asks, puzzled.

Her head whips to the side. The movement rattles her, and her arms flail for a moment before she can settle back onto her heels. In spite of the disturbance, she doesn’t look angry—instead, her features relax the moment she’s recovered.

“Ah, Katsuzou. Just the man I wanted to see,” Nobunaga says. She points to the shelf that had eluded her. “I need you to get me something from there.”

She carries herself with the same confidence she always has, head high and hands on her hips. This would be much less absurd if only she weren’t standing on a chair, if only she weren’t still so small that even upon her perch she has to tip her chin up to look at him properly.

A howl of a laugh spills out of him. “Ootono, what the hell are you doin’? You look ridiculous! You’re, you’re like a little dog or somethin’—shit, that’s funny!”

Nobunaga does not seem to think it’s funny. Her arms cross over her chest, boot tapping an impatient rhythm against the wood grain. She doesn’t stop his laughter, perhaps because she knows that it will come to an abrupt halt at a moment’s notice, same as always. And it does; maybe ten seconds more, and it dies in his lungs, his lips falling back to rest over his teeth.

“Are you finished?” she asks with a frown. “Good. Well, now that you’ve had your laugh, you can help me.”

“Ah, sure, sure. Top shelf, right?”

Mori doesn’t wait for an answer. He steps around to curve his hands beneath Nobunaga’s arms, lifting her up as easily as he might lift a cat.

“You idiot,” Nobunaga snaps, “I meant that _you_ would get it from the top shelf for me!”

“Well, I dunno what it is you wanna get, so I’ll just let you grab it.”

“You’re so—” she starts, but Mori already has her suspended at eye level with the shelf, so she lets any protests fade with a defeated sigh. “Ugh, fine, you big maroon.”

She reaches into the cabinet, brushing aside boxes of baking ingredients until her fingers find whatever it is she’s looking for. What she withdraws is a glass flask, three-quarters full with star-shaped candy in all different colors.

“Whassat?”

“Konpeito,” she says, shaking it back and forth with a series of small clinks. “I have Master hide it up here for me so that the kids can’t get into it.”

“But you can’t get into it, either,” he points out. She goes quiet. Another laugh, nasally and unbidden, starts to escape him. “So it’s like—it’s like you’re a—”

“I would think very carefully about how you finish that sentence,” Nobunaga says. There’s a brief pause filled only by Mori’s amused wheezing, and then she squirms in his grip. “And put me down, while you’re at it! I never asked for you to pick me up!”

His snickering doesn’t stop when he sets her safe back on her feet. It only peters out when she snaps her fingers at him and gestures towards herself. He knows this command, and though he knows he no longer needs to follow it, he crouches anyways to match her height. She takes his hand in her much smaller one, cups it, and shakes a few sugary stars into it.

“Ootono?” he asks, brows raised.

“Think of it as compensation for your help,” she says. “Be grateful, I don’t share these often.”

He stares, first at the offering, and then at her. She’s already turned her back to him, poised to head out of the kitchen, though her footsteps freeze when she hears him snort.

“You’ve gotten soft, Ootono,” he tells her. “Real soft. I don’t hate it, though!”

“Don’t push your luck,” she says over her shoulder, but the bite in her voice that he remembers so well is all but gone—and in a matter of seconds, so is she, leaving him with sugar sticky on his palm and a ghost of a laugh still in the back of his throat.


	2. Maou/Majin - Trying New Things

That one,” Majin says, pointing at a cluster of fried batter balls. Her voice hardly carries through the din of the street around them, half-muffled in her scarf as it is.

“That one?” Maou repeats. “The takoyaki?”

Majin responds with a nod, and so Maou forks the necessary coin over to the vendor in exchange for a small paper tray. The way Majin’s eyes shine as Maou hands it off to her, bright beneath the red and gold glow of all the lanterns hung around, is enough to pull the corners of Maou’s mouth up just a little.

Her smile grows wider when Majin sinks her teeth into a piece, overeager, only for her jaw to fall slack with a huff of pain.

“Ah—hot, hot…”

“Careful, now. I keep telling you, most of these foods will burn your tongue if you eat them too quickly,” Maou says.

Majin grunts her affirmation. When she chews, it’s slower, more careful, brows furrowing in deep thought.

Maou’s own brows lift. “Well?”

“Hmmm.” Majin eats what remains of the ball off its toothpick, pushing it into her cheek with a hum. “Not as good as oden. But I like it.”

Maou laughs. “Will you ever find anything you like as much as oden?”

“I don’t know. All I can do is keep trying delicious new things, until I’ve found whichever is the most delicious.”

“Well said.” That is, after all, the reason that Maou had wanted to bring Majin out to the street vendors peddling their wares outside of her casino. Majin has not known desire for long, but if there’s one thing that she’s grown to crave without fail, it’s new food. Maou, ever-interested in observing others’ growth, has found endless amusement in the way Majin’s face lights up whenever she discovers another mundane thing that makes life worth living.

She also finds amusement in little offenses—for instance, when Majin spears another ball on her toothpick, Maou leans in to snap it up in one bite, tucking the whole thing right behind her grin with no regard for the heat that sears her tongue.

Majin balks at her. The toothpick falls back into the tray, and she shifts to hold it close to her chest protectively with one hand as the other falls to the hilt of her sword.

“Ah, hold on—” Maou raises both her hands in defense, chews a bit to make speaking easier. “This isn’t the place for a scuffle. Besides, you can’t get mad at me, I paid for that.”

That’s enough to loosen Majin’s grip on her blade, but it also causes her to sulk, takoyaki still held close to her own body.

“Don’t be like that,” Maou says. “I can still pay for whatever else you want, too.”

Majin considers this. Her hand drops from her sword to her side, and after several moments she says, “Oden. I want more oden.”

“I’ll get you oden, then. Just for you,” Maou says, palm lifting to rest softly on the crown of Majin’s head.

At that, Majin finally relaxes, placated. She moves to pick at her takoyaki again, and in the absence of a free hand to hold as they continue walking, Maou bends an arm loosely around her companion’s shoulders instead.


	3. Kippoushi/Okita - Up a Tree

“How fast do you think I could climb this tree?”

Okita follows Kippoushi’s line of sight up a towering black pine, one of many that litter the coastal grasslands of Shimousa. It can’t be any less than ten, maybe eleven meters tall, by her estimation. Certainly not an easy climb, nor one that would be fast enough to count as anything but a waste of time.

She frowns and says, “What I think is that you need to keep your head out of the clouds.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to think that,” Kippoushi laughs, unbothered, always so unbothered.

It seems that every Nobunaga is exactly as prone to taking on unwise challenges as they are to ignoring Okita’s advice. Knowing this, Okita isn’t surprised when Kippoushi springs for the lowest branch of the tree, but she’s still disappointed.

“Are you really going to go up that whole thing?”

“Well, why not?” they ask as they haul themselves up with surprising ease. They flash a grin at her over their shoulder, all teeth, before they disappear between the pine needles with a sharp rustle.

“Hey—” Okita rushes to the base of the tree to peer up between its branches. “Get back here, we’re supposed to be scouting!”

“I am!” Kippoushi calls back. “What better way to do that than to get a good view?”

Okita can feel the dizzy rush of blood to her head when she realizes how fast their form is shrinking between the twisting spires of bark. It’s been no more than twenty seconds and they’re already halfway to the top.

“And what are you going to do if you fall, huh?” she asks.

“What, you worried about me?” Their voice is distant, but she can hear the smile in it clear as ever. “A fall like this couldn’t kill me, I’m a Servant.”

“It would hurt, though!”

“Haha, probably!”

Their nonchalance takes Okita aback. The only inkling of concern she senses from them at all is a startled “Ah!” accompanied by more rustling and the plop of their hat into the grass by Okita’s feet. Okita bends to grab it and casts a glare up to where they peer down at her, having nearly crested the highest branches. In response, they give her a cheerful wave and ask, “Wanna bring that up to me?”

“Are you kidding me? Come down here and get it yourself,” she snaps.

“Aw, but I just got here.” Their legs dangle off the edge of a branch, as if they’re taking their time to savor the landscape from up high.

“Well, maybe you should’ve thought about that before doing something dumb.”

“You should know well enough by now that that’s not my style, Okita.” There’s a pause, and she thinks she hears a sigh. “Ah, fine.”

With that they begin to descend, much more quickly than they’d climbed up, loud cracks of wood and a little rain of pine needles following in their wake. In a mere matter of seconds they’ve reached the lowest branch and hooked both legs over, body thrown back to hang upside down off of it. Their head is close to Okita’s now, close enough that she can see the needles that stuck to their clothes and nestled in their ridiculous bird’s nest of a ponytail.

“Well, how was that?” they ask, smiling broadly. “Fast, right? I think I counted about… thirty-four seconds to scale it, maybe.”

Okita scoffs. “That’s what you care about?”

“I mean, I would’ve liked to see more of the view too, but someone reeeaaally wanted me back down here.” 

“What I wanted was for you to stop messing around, you monkey.” For emphasis, she swats the side of Kippoushi’s face with their hat.

They take it from her with a laugh, unfazed as ever. “I guess that was pretty monkey-like of me, huh? How ironic, since that was my retainer’s nickname.”

“That should be your nickname instead,” Okita says. “Since you smell like one.”

“Hah?!” That’s the first thing to startle them today, enough that they lose their hold on the branch. They fall to the ground with an ungraceful _thud_ and a loud wheeze, and despite herself, a snort rises in the back of Okita’s throat.

“You heard me,” she says. “Come on, Monkey, get up. We still have work to do around here.”

She turns on her heel, away from their weak protests of “I don’t smell that bad” and “How do you even know what a monkey smells like?” She won’t dignify them with an answer any more than she’ll be truthful with herself in this situation. They have more important things to worry about, as she’s already said.

If she were to deign to be honest, though—she might admit that the smell of pine that clung to them wasn’t all that bad, and that the intrigue that draws her line of sight to the horizon, off towards the distant coast, is begging the child in her to seek higher ground just the same.


	4. Nobunaga & Nobukatsu - Nostalgia

Of all the places Nobunaga might have expected to find her younger brother—that is, during the times he’s able to materialize at all—passed out on Chaldea’s common room couch isn’t one of them. In fact, when he’s not in spirit form or off causing trouble somewhere, she normally expects him to trail after her like a lost puppy. 

It’s not a problem that he isn’t. It’s not. She never did like that he followed her around, anyway. _Go make friends_, she always tells him, _I’m not your babysitter._

She hasn’t ever been his babysitter, but the last time she came close was when they were both children, when she would drag him outside past their bedtime to catch crickets until the exhaustion put him on the verge of collapsing right there in the grass. He always did have a weak constitution, she recalls. On some of those nights she would have to lift his limp little body onto her back to carry him to bed, if only so that they wouldn’t get caught. 

The desire to do such a thing no longer exists in her. She’s not sure why it is, then, that she doesn’t immediately turn to leave him there until his form dissipates entirely. It will happen sooner or later, as it always does, because he can never manifest for too long.

Bright bursts of color spill across the floor and over the couch where Nobukatsu sleeps, synchronized with the quiet noise from the TV. Nobunaga snorts. How irresponsible of him to leave it on. She steps farther into the room, intending to shut it off, only to stop short when she gets a proper look at the screen.

“Unbelievable,” she mutters. “How did he manage to fall asleep while watching _JoJo?_”

In truth, she wouldn’t have expected it to be the sort of show he liked in the first place. Try as he might to pretend otherwise, he’s never liked violence, at least not if he had to see it. Nobunaga could talk for hours on end to anyone who would listen about how incredible the fight scenes are, but Nobukatsu wouldn’t have any reason to—

She pauses, thumb poised over the TV’s power button. No, she realizes, he does have a reason to stay up past midnight watching anime. It’s just not out of any personal interest.

“So that’s it, then,” she whispers. Her hand falls back to her side, the power button still untouched. “That idiot.”

She straightens, throwing another glance over at him. His form appears remarkably solid for now. It must be because he fell asleep in the middle of doing something mundane; otherwise, he’d likely dismiss himself for a while instead. She figures that in any case, he will soon enough.

That leaves her without a reason to mill about the room, lit only by the flashes from the TV, to fumble for one of the spare blankets draped over a chair. It’s silly of her to think to toss it over his prone form, as if he could feel the cold to begin with. The fabric doesn’t even cover his feet, and there’s no reason for her to correct that, either, but she tugs it down anyway with a grumble about how tall he’s gotten. Taller than her, much taller than the child she knows he still is on the inside.

But she is not a child. She would like to believe that the part of her that he so fondly calls “Aneue” is one that she cut away a long time ago. She decides not to dwell on how her presence here says otherwise.

With that in mind, she doesn’t linger. The TV is shut off at last, dying the room black save for the square of dim light cut into the room from the hallway. That’s what Nobunaga escapes into, as fluidly as if she were one of the shadows—all the easier for her to pretend that she saw nothing, like she was never there at all.


	5. Nobu/Okita - Sour Candy

Okita has never understood Nobunaga’s fascination with all things Western. It’s not that she hates the West, at least not anymore; it’s that she sees no reason for the foreign to be so special. 

“It’s the novelty,” Nobunaga told her once, cheek distended around a piece of candy. “You really oughtta take the time to broaden your horizons, Okita. What else are we supposed to do with the time we’ve got here?”

As if to prove her point, she dug around in her pocket and withdrew a piece of candy sealed in a neon wrapper. “Try this,” she’d insisted, as she always did when she found something new that she liked. “It’s kinda sour at first, but it’s good.”

It was indeed sour—so sour, in fact, that Okita had spit it out within seconds, tongue still prickling as if she’d been burned.

“Aw, you wasted a perfectly good one,” Nobunaga said, though she sounded more amused than anything else. “I even gave you the best flavor.”

“What kind of flavor was that even supposed to be? It didn’t taste like anything except… except, uh…” Okita fumbled, as if that very taste had left her paralyzed.

Nobunaga grinned. “There’s nothing like it that you’ve ever had, right?”

“Of course not. The flavor in Japanese sweets is way more subtle—” She paused, then, a rush of clarity coming to chase away the sting in her mouth. “Don’t tell me that’s why you eat this crap.”

“Well, I also just happen to like it.” She clicked the candy around between her teeth, almost chewing but not quite. “‘Sides, it gets sweeter the longer you suck on it.”

“You’re so weird,” Okita scoffed. “And what about when it’s not novel anymore, huh? Will it still be any good?”

“Maybe, maybe not. There’ll always be other stuff to try, though. That’s what broadening your horizons is all about. Live a little, sample what’s out there. Who knows, you might even like it!”

“Not if it’s anything like what you just gave me.”

Nobunaga had only laughed at her, because she knew as well as Okita did that there were plenty of things she’d given her—most of them never asked for, but always begrudgingly accepted—that Okita had taken to. Sometimes it was something new to put in her hair that Nobunaga thought would be pretty, and sometimes it was the too-sweet candy from lands Okita’s never visited.

Lately, Nobunaga’s odd gifts have felt more like souvenirs than anything else, pieces of places that Okita isn’t brought to. Okita is usually too sick to “expand her horizons” as Nobunaga always presses her to. It’s a funny kind of irony that her desire for sameness is now fulfilled in this way: one uneventful day after the next, even the flurry of snow outside of Chaldea’s observatory windows an unchanging, eternal winter.

Okita watches the blizzard outside sometimes, when she’s too tired to train and too alone to be distracted. It is in these moments that Okita feels Nobunaga’s absence the most potently. The silence, without Nobunaga’s laughter or babbling or even just her breathing to fill it, is louder than the wind against the glass.

An absentminded shift to adjust her obi yields a soft crinkle. With a frown, she dips her hand beneath it. Her fingers come loose with a small piece of candy wrapped in bright neon foil. The same kind that Nobunaga likes, she remembers.

Rationally, she knows she should save it for Nobunaga’s return. Nobunaga likes it, and Okita doesn’t. Even so, the urge to unwrap it moves her fingers, prompts her to take it out and hold the gritty surface of it between her forefinger and thumb. Three seconds of deliberation is all it takes for her to pop it into her mouth. The taste is exactly as painful as she remembers, but this time, she doesn’t spit it out. She lets it sit there, acidic on her tongue, and wonders again why Nobunaga so enjoys the way it burns.

_It gets sweeter the longer you suck on it_, Nobunaga had promised. Okita doesn’t quite do that, but she waits for it to melt, eyes refocusing on the shifting white beyond Chaldea’s confines.

Okita has moved past hating the foreign, but she will always hate the way that it feels to wait. She is always waiting, it seems, for one thing or another—for Nobunaga to come back, for the chance to be of any use, for the ability to breathe like she used to. That’s one thing that won’t change; it will never become any easier.

But it doesn’t take long for the candy to dissolve, and when the sugar sinks in at last she rolls it around, unsure what to think of it.

_Huh_, she thinks, not for the first time, _I guess she was right._


	6. Nobu/Okita - Act of Kindness

When the coughing starts again, Nobunaga lowers her guns. Okita takes a knee, trembling fingers still curled around the hilt of her katana, and tries to stifle it in her hand only to pull it away red. Her face, too, is red as she fixes her eyes on the ground stains and picks up the quiet, unhurried clicking of Nobunaga’s boots.

“Well, I think that’s enough for today.”

“I’m fine,” Okita insists, “I’m _fine_, we’re just sparring, I can keep going—”

“Nope! You’re not fine, so it’s break time.” She shoves her hand out to Okita, palm up. “Here.”

Okita ignores the gesture. She can get back to her feet well enough on her own—or so she thinks until she actually tries it, and gravity makes her lightheaded. She drops her sword and hacks as if she could spit up that pressure in her chest, but they both know she can’t.

Nobunaga doesn’t say anything else. She crouches, turned away, and pulls Okita’s arms over her shoulders, finds her thighs with her hands. She wobbles a bit when she rises with Okita on her back, but grows certain of her footing soon enough and begins the trek out to the hallway. Okita lets her because she’s too winded to do anything else.

The silence stretches out between them in that fashion, punctuated by the tap, tap, tap, of Nobunaga’s footsteps, until it becomes more oppressive than the ache in Okita’s lungs. She says, hoarse, “I know you want to make fun of me.”

“Do you _want_ me to make fun of you?”

“Of course not! It’s just weird that you aren’t.” She clears her throat, swallowing the tang that sticks to the back of it. “It’s weird when you’re nice.”

“Is that so?” Nobunaga barks a loud laugh. “Weird in a bad way, or in a good way?”

“I don’t know—good? I guess? I don’t hate it.” 

“Then I don’t see what the problem is here.”

“The problem is…” Okita doesn’t know what the problem is, she realizes. Maybe that in itself is a problem. “The problem is that I’m used to you gloating whenever you win.”

“This isn’t a win, though. Doesn’t count if I couldn’t beat you while you were at your best.”

Okita frowns. “How honorable of you.”

“If that’s what you want to call it.” Her feet come to a halt in front of a door that Okita, without glancing up, assumes is hers. Nobunaga’s hands shift to adjust their grip on Okita’s legs. “Listen, Okita—if I felt like making fun of you I could do that about plenty of other things.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I’m serious! I don’t go for the low-hanging fruit. Like…” Nobunaga is crouching now, just low enough for Okita to find her footing again. She waits until Okita has taken more of her own weight before straightening, and even as she does she slips a discreet hand down to the small of Okita’s back to steady her. “There’s nothing satisfying about teasing people for things that can’t be helped.”

Despite herself, Okita’s fingers curl in the fabric of Nobunaga’s mantle. “Oh.” 

“You sound surprised,” Nobunaga laughs as she pushes the door open, pulling Okita along with her. “I’m not that mean, Okita, come on. You’re breaking my heart, here.”

“You sound very heartbroken, yes.”

“I really am! More than you know.”

Okita rolls her eyes. She would know if Nobunaga was at all bothered, because Nobunaga loves to sulk and make her problems everyone else’s in a manner so shameless that Okita can’t comprehend it. Okita would prefer if no one knew she had problems at all. If it were up to her, no one would be able to witness her collapse, not even Nobunaga.

Yet without her notice, her fist remains balled in Nobunaga’s mantle even after she’s been settled on the edge of her bed. Nobunaga is the one to glance at where the two of them connect, brows raised with an unasked question.

“I—” Okita wonders for a second if the taste of blood in her mouth is leftover or fresh from where her teeth dig into her lower lip. The word “stay” is stuck somewhere in her throat like proof of her sickness, so she substitutes it with, “You don’t need to leave.”

“Oh?” Nobunaga’s eyes narrow, her smile showing in them even before it pulls on the corners of her mouth. “Well, if you enjoy my company that much, I guess I can’t say no.”

Okita wants to point out that Nobunaga is free to do as she pleases, but doesn’t get the chance; the thought is jostled out of her by Nobunaga’s weight, flopped onto Okita’s mattress like it’s where she belongs. 

(And Okita supposes, in some manner of speaking, that it is.)


	7. Maou/Majin - Sensory

The Devil Saber, as it turns out, has a penchant for seeking out the tactile.

In a way, it makes sense. All she knew before was her one purpose; now, bombarded with new information from every angle, she wants to absorb it all at once, as if she could grasp the world itself between her battle-weathered hands.

What this means in practice is that she must put her hands on everything, and she’s taken a particular liking to the feel of the Demon King’s long, silk-like hair.

That’s often where her fingers go when the two of them are alone nowadays. Maou doesn’t mind it. If anything, it’s endearing—not to mention safer than some of Majin’s past attempts to touch things, or worse yet, put them in her mouth.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” The question comes like clockwork after several minutes spent with Majin’s weight against her side, the fingers of one hand twisting Maou’s hair around between them. That’s the only indication she has that Majin hasn’t fallen asleep on her just yet. It wouldn’t be the first time Maou’s sat down with a book and ended up with a soft pressure on her shoulder and quiet snoring close to her ear.

“Mm,” Majin hums. A typical response. If words aren’t necessary, she generally won’t use them.

“Glad to hear it.” Maou’s eyes dart off her page and to the side just for a second to see how Majin’s cheek is squished against her biceps. Her eyes are lidded, not with boredom, but with what Maou hopes is contentment. “Would you like something better to do that with?”

Majin blinks up at her. “What?”

“You like to play with my hair,” Maou says. “Would you like to comb it?”

Majin’s head tilts, now alert. “Can I?”

“I don’t know, can you?”

That only earns her a blank stare. Maou chuckles and lays a couple of gentle pats to Majin’s head before extricating herself to stand. She can feel Majin’s eyes on her as she steps over to her dresser to retrieve a wooden comb, small and fine-toothed. As she returns to Majin with it, her mind conjures the image of a puppy, awaiting her with legs folded under her and ears perked.

“Here,” she says, and she tosses her hair out behind her as she would make one fluid sweep of her mantle, settling back at her low table. She holds the comb up for Majin to take. “Just try not to tangle it.”

Majin accepts the comb with a stiff nod and delicate fingers. Maou returns to her reading with one last brief look over her shoulder just to see how Majin’s brows knit in a concentration bordering on reverent, and she says, “I can do yours next, if you’d like.”

“You’d do that?” Majin asks, voice pitching up from its usual quiet monotone. It’s the best indication of excitement Maou ever gets from her. As if hyperaware of this, Majin clears her throat a breath later and says more quietly, “Yes, um. I would like that.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Maou says, gaze falling back to her book. “It’s only fair.”

She hears another pleased little hum, and within a few seconds there’s a gentle tugging at her scalp: hesitant at first, then surer, steady strokes that fall into something of a rhythm save for the occasional snag. A warm smile settles over her features. In spite of her offer, she thinks that she’d be perfectly happy to stay just like this for a good long while—or at least for as long as Majin would be happy doing so.


	8. Nobu/Kagetora - Retribution

Nobunaga wouldn’t like to say that she runs from fights; however, she is not above the occasional tactical retreat. The outcome of a battle is determined at the start, she’s always said, and if that outcome is not in her favor then she’d rather not stick around to see it through.

This is what she tells herself as she bounds down the halls as fast as her short legs can carry her, a somehow cold and unfeeling “Nyahaha—!” echoing not far behind.

Something about that laugh douses Nobunaga’s nerves like ice water. She’d never heard it on the battlefield, had hoped she’d never need to, and for good reason: the God of War stands as an undefeated, violent madwoman that only nature was strong enough to kill.

Nobunaga skids around a corner, feet nearly slipping out from beneath her as she does. A second later, she’s almost glad for it; something like a gust of wind rustles her hair, and there’s the pole of a naginata jutting from the wall, centimeters from where her head had just been.

She swears, maybe a bit too loudly. Another deranged cackle is her response, and it sounds closer than it was last time, but she doesn’t dare steal a glance backward to check.

“Why are you running?” Kagetora calls, the same lilt in her voice as always. “Is it because you know you can’t beat me? Or are you just a coward?”

“I’m not—” Nobunaga begins to argue, but it’s not Kagetora that cuts her off. It’s the traitorous swish of her own cape, catching beneath one of her boots as she makes another turn. She tumbles forward with a yelp, and with that, her fate is sealed. Her attempt to right herself by rolling onto her back is met with a weight on her middle, the point of a blade beneath her chin and a grin so wide and so fake as to make Nobunaga’s spine quiver.

“Caught you,” Kagetora says, a soft sing-song that makes a sweat break out beneath Nobunaga’s bangs. “That took a while, but you know what? I don’t mind! It was fun—” She stops, clears her throat. “I mean, it all turned out fine in the end.”

“Okay, so you caught me,” Nobunaga says, forcing a grin as wide and fake as Kagetora’s. “What are you gonna do now, kill me? I’ll just come back.”

Kagetora tilts her head. “Hmmm, no. Execution as a punishment for theft of alcohol is a bit harsh, even for Bishamonten.”

“Then how come you threw your naginata at my head just a minute ago?”

“Oh, did I?” Kagetora’s smile seems innocent, but her eyes gleam. “You’ll have to excuse my aim, then. I was never good with projectiles, and you were running very fast.”

“Because you were brandishing your weapons at me!” Indignation replaces any anxiety underlying Nobunaga’s voice. “How do you even know I stole from you to begin with, huh? There are way heavier drinkers around here than me!”

“Well, it must have been last night that my sake went missing, because it was there yesterday and not there this morning,” Kagetora explains, settling her weight back harder on Nobunaga’s torso to draw out a wheeze. “And Okita just happened to complain to me about how drunk you were last night. She said you were completely insufferable, nyaha!”

Nobunaga grits her teeth. _That damned narc._ She’ll have to give Okita a piece of her mind later. For the time being, she’s not going anywhere—Kagetora’s legs locked firm around her waist make sure of that.

“I didn’t know that was yours,” she says. It’s a lie, she remembers that it was, and it makes Kagetora’s eyes narrow.

“You know how to read, yes? It was clearly labeled.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have left it out where anyone could take it, then.”

That gets the cool edge of Kagetora’s blade pressed against her throat, just enough that she thinks if she swallowed it might break skin. Kagetora is still smiling, same as always, and it is just as empty as always, devoid of anything except bloodlust. 

“You are lucky,” she says, “that it would be in bad taste for me to kill you over something like this.”

Nobunaga holds Kagetora’s stare. “Then, ah. How about you just let me go?”

“I think not.” Kagetora lifts her weapon, but not her body. “That was my good sake. But don’t worry…” Her face is closer now, and her voice quieter, as though the vitriol it carries is a secret meant only for Nobunaga. “I can think of other ways that you can pay me back.”

“Hah?” The noise Nobunaga makes is pitchier than she’d like it to be. Although there’s no longer a threat being held to her neck, her pulse hammers through it as though there was. “Like—like what?” she asks, the question not nearly as much of a challenge as she’d intended. “Wait, are you—”

Kagetora ignores her half-formed questions. She rises, swift as a cat, and yanks Nobunaga up with her by the front of her coat. Nobunaga grasps fruitlessly at Kagetora’s forearm, but to no avail. Her grip is firm, matching the determination with which she marches back down the hall the way they came, Nobunaga in tow.

“First we’re going to see Master,” Kagetora says. “I have to let someone know why you’re doing my share of chores.”

Nobunaga all but deflates, her feet dragging on the tile with a disappointment she doesn’t dare try to place the cause of. Even through the barrage of whining that follows—_Oh, come on, surely you can think of something better than that, why can’t I just get you more booze?_—Nobunaga’s heart thrums loud in her ears with something that is maybe fear, maybe something worse.


	9. Maou/Okita - Invitation

Most days, it isn’t that hard to find Nobunaga. If she wants to be found—and her enduring desire for attention dictates that she often will—she will make her presence known, loudly and often at the cost of someone else’s personal property.

Where she usually isn’t, unless she’s taking a nap, is her own room. That is always the last door Okita thinks to knock on, and always with the assumption that she dozed off. She doesn’t think that it will be answered quickly. She also doesn’t expect that when it is, she has to look up.

“Ah, man-slayer,” Maou says, brows lifted. “Can I help you?”

“Oh.” Okita’s hand, which had rested idly on the hilt of her katana before, is now curled around it tightly. It’s not an act of aggression, as the sweat that breaks out on her palms tells her. It’s all nerves. It’s anxiety that she’ll never admit to having. “I was just, uh. I was looking for Nobu—I mean, you are one, but—”

“One of the other ones?” The corners of Maou’s eyes wrinkle with amusement. With a click of her tongue, she says, “And here I thought someone might’ve wanted to visit me, for once.” 

“Uh,” Okita blinks, uncertain how she’s supposed to respond to that. “Uh?”

The edges of Maou’s smile flag slightly. “That was a joke,” she says, “disregard it. What did you need her for?”

“Well, uh. Usually around this time, we go into the simulators to train for a while, since other people aren’t using them.” She doesn’t mention how often training turns into Nobunaga goofing off, and sometimes into something else. Maou likely doesn’t care about that. With that in mind, Okita takes a step back and says, “But if she’s not around right now, that’s fine—”

“Ahh, sparring. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to do that. You’ll have to forgive me for getting in the way of it, but…” Maou props an arm against the doorway and leans her weight on it. Her head inclines to bring her face a bit closer, all the better to lock eyes with Okita. “If you need a partner to train with, I wouldn’t mind filling the position.”

“Huh?” The offer stuns Okita, because she isn’t close to Maou in the same way that she is to the other Nobunaga. Still, Maou watches Okita with an unexpected intensity that brings heat to her cheeks, and she’s acutely reminded of the way that she’s seen Maou fight: all of that same intensity, channeled less into guns and more into her fists, into her long and flexible legs.

The realization comes, like a scalding puff of steam from an opened kettle, that keeping her eyes trained upward to meet Maou’s is very, very difficult.

“What,” Maou asks, “is that so strange?”

“Not really, it’s just. Uh. I wasn’t expecting it? But—” Okita licks at the backs of her teeth as if she’d find an excuse sitting there. “Really, you don’t need to bother. I mean, I had something else I needed to do, anyway.”

“Is that so.” Maou’s eyes narrow, but there’s no irritation in them. Okita thinks the lines in her features spell out something closer to disappointment, too much like the disappointment that etches itself into Nobunaga’s when Okita tells her that she needs time alone, but she can’t be sure. Maou stands straight again and says, “Pity. Some other time, then.”

“R-Right.” Okita gives her a nod and a quick “Then if you’ll excuse me,” then pivots on her heel to walk back down the hall just a bit faster than necessary.

“My door is always open to you, man-slayer,” Maou calls from behind her. “I do so enjoy a good challenge.”

Okita, mouth dry, doesn’t respond. She can feel Maou’s eyes on her, all but searing holes into the back of her haori as she goes, and she wonders despite herself just what sort of invitation she turned down.


	10. Kippoushi & Billy - Straight-shooting

“Y’know, I’ve been wonderin’…” Billy pauses to give a subtle dip of his chin. “How do you carry that thing around with you all the time?”

Kippoushi doesn’t need to follow Billy’s eyes to know that he’s referring to the enormous gun they keep propped over their shoulder. It’s hardly the first time they’ve been asked that question, but they still feel compelled to shrug and say, “Oh, this? This is nothin’. I’ve handled heavier.”

“Really? Huh.” Billy grabs his hat and ducks beneath a branch—something that he doesn’t often need to do, Kippoushi notes with amusement, but they follow suit without remarking upon it. “See, I can’t imagine lugging somethin’ that big around. Wouldn’t be a quick draw if I couldn’t maneuver it like so.” To prove his point, he flips out his pistol and twirls it between his fingers as deftly as a calligraphy brush.

Kippoushi laughs. “I can’t really do any fancy tricks like that, but.” Another shrug, and their gun dissolves in a burst of gold dust. “I don’t have to lug it around.”

“Yeah, but why do you? Doesn’t it get in the way in a place like this?”

“‘Cause it looks cool, duh!” Kippoushi lets it materialize again, a comfortable and familiar weight on their shoulder. “Plus there’s nothing wrong with having it ready to go, right?”

“Huh, that’s more cautious than I expected from you—no disrespect intended,” Billy says. “Being mindful’s never a bad thing. Though I don’t reckon there are any reasons left around here for us to keep our guard up, at this rate.”

“You think we’ve hunted everything?”

“Probably, yeah.”

“Huh.” Kippoushi stops to lean idly against a tree. “Wanna head back, then? Or we could change the simulator settings, if you still feel like training. Maybe to something different than a forest.”

“That’s awful considerate. I know you like the forest, but,” Billy mirrors Kippoushi’s pose against a different tree with a wistful sigh, “the plains are more like what I’m used to. Nowhere to hide, just you and the wide open sky…”

“Ah, better for straight-shooting, right?”

Billy smiles and flicks the brim of his hat up with his thumb. “Now you’re speakin’ my language.”

“All right!” Kippoushi pushes themselves up again with a slap to their chest. “I’m not really the honest type, but a level playing field should be interesting. Won’t have to worry so much about what I’m shooting at with this thing, either!” 

“Where I’m from we’d consider that a waste of ammo,” Billy says. “Aim is everything, y’know?”

“I know how to aim, but hitting one thing accurately’s not as important when you can fire this fast.” They heft their gun off their shoulder and into their hands. “You ever fire one of these? It’s fun!”

Billy’s eyes flit from the gun back up to Kippoushi’s face. “To be perfectly honest with you,” he says, “I’m not sure I could even lift that.”

“You sure you don’t wanna try?” Kippoushi holds their arms out in an invitation, all forty-odd kilograms of heavy weaponry hanging from both fists like it’s nothing.

“Hmm…” Billy sizes up the weapon one more time, and after a few drawn-out seconds of hesitation, grips it where Kippoushi’s own hands indicate.

Kippoushi lets go. The gun clatters to the ground, yanking Billy’s upper half down with it.

“Oh, son of a—”

“Pfft—” Kippoushi can’t help themselves. They start to cackle, high and raucous, as Billy draws himself up and dusts his front down with a few crisp, curt pats.

“Told ya,” he says, and though he rolls his eyes at Kippoushi’s laughter, he doesn’t look too miffed by it. “It’s best that I stick to the gun I’ve got now. Not that I’d trade Thunder for anything.” He pats his holster for emphasis.

Kippoushi draws a finger beneath one eye and sighs. “Well, can’t argue with that. Skill’s got nothing to do with size.”

“You get me!” Billy waits for Kippoushi to retrieve their gun and hoist it over their shoulder, and then the two of them are back on their path through the woods—but not before Billy gives his hat a tip in Kippoushi’s direction and says, quiet as though it were confidential, “But I’ll admit: what you’ve got is pretty cool, too.”


	11. Kippoushi/Okita - Pocky Day

“Oi, Okita, check this out!”

Okita glances up from the boiler room’s kotatsu at the sound of her name, a wad of dango stuffed into her cheek. She looks startled at their approach, but not surprised; they hope it’s because she’s gotten used to them appearing at random intervals.

“Oh, Nobu.” She chews, swallows, and sets what remains of her dango stick down on a napkin. “What is it?”

Kippoushi thrusts an arm out by way of answer, shaking a small box in front of her face. “Look! Did you know that they made melon-flavored pocky?”

“Ah.” Okita blinks. “I did not.”

“Yeah, apparently there’s more than just this, too. Master had a bunch, but gave this one to me because most others wanted, like, chocolate or strawberry. Their loss!” They flip the top of the box back with their thumb and peer inside. “Hey, do you think I could fit all of these in my mouth at once?”

“Are you an idiot?” Okita huffs, “If you did that it’d be a waste. Oh, and you’d probably choke, too.”

“Huh, I guess so.” Kippoushi pulls a stick out with their teeth, then pauses, studying the furrow in Okita’s brow and the pink dusting her cheekbones. “Oh, uh.” They give the box another rattle and lean over the kotatsu, the coated end of the biscuit still hanging from between their lips. “Didja want some? ‘Cause I don’t mind sharing.”

Okita’s answer is the way her neck cranes to meet them, mouth closing around the opposite end of the stick in a couple of quick, fierce bites. For a second, she’s a hair away, so close that they can hear the crunch between her teeth and feel the triumphant little huff of air she lets out against their face when their jaw goes slack, dropping the fragment that remains.

“I win,” she says as she settles back onto her cushion, chewing loudly with satisfaction.

“You—oh. Oh!” Kippoushi cups a hand over their mouth, still warm with the ghost of her breath, warm as the rest of their face is now. A laugh, a response more stunned than anything else, bubbles from between their fingers. “That’s, uh. I see! I didn’t realize that was the kind of game you wanted to play.”

“I thought—” Okita’s cheeks start to fill with a color resembling her hakama. “I thought you wanted to, stupid! That you were offering!”

“Oh, did seeing me bring pocky over excite you that much?” they ask, grinning now. “In that case…” They take another stick into their mouth and bend in close again, tongue pressing on it so that it bobs up and down. “I’ll make a real offer, then. Care for a rematch?”

This time, Okita doesn’t fare quite so well as she did before, and Kippoushi considers the bigger end of the stick as much a victory as the press of Okita’s lips claimed shortly after.


	12. Nobu/Okita - Cherry Blossoms

It’s around the third week of the third month after the lunar new year when the sakura blossom the most vibrantly. Nobunaga remembers as much from her campaigns close to Japan’s eastern shores: if the calm between the carnage allowed for it, that was the best time to watch the spring coat the trees in a soft pink blanket.

“Are you sure we’re supposed to be here?” Okita asks for what must be the fourth time, but Nobunaga is ever the unrelenting force she’s always been, even if conquest is the farthest thing from her mind right now.

“I keep telling you, it’s fine!” she says, fingers tight around Okita’s wrist to pull her along. They wade through grass that tickles all the way up to their shins, following the slope of the hills that roll over rural Shimousa. It’s not a place Nobunaga had ever visited in life, but the freedom to Rayshift has brought her here more than once. More than once, she’s gotten in trouble for it, but she thinks it worth the risk this time. “I got Da Vinci’s permission to bring just you along for this, so it should be fine.”

“You’re sure? I mean, even if we have permission, just the two of us on a mission is kind of…”

“Sure I’m sure. We probably won’t run into anything we need to fight, anyway.”

“Huh?” There’s a tug on Nobunaga’s arm, Okita’s feet planted firmly at a halt. “What do you mean, we probably won’t fight anything? You said this was of major importance!” 

“Because it is! It’s _super_ important. To me, that is.”

Okita’s response is to twist her arm. “Nobu, we have to head back.”

“Hey, hey, c’mon, hear me out!” Nobunaga lets go of Okita and spreads her hands. “Okay, so it’s not dire. But does it need to be? Nothing’s been going on lately, so I thought it’d be nice to get out, see something different. And I did say I got permission!”

“Well…” Okita glances to the side in hesitation.

Nobunaga holds her hand out again. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Absolutely not,” Okita says. She rests her palm against Nobunaga’s, and Nobunaga grins.

“You wound me.”

“Good.”

Nobunaga rolls her eyes and curls her hand more comfortably, lets her fingers slide into the gaps between Okita’s. They continue to walk, the sakura trees scattered near the distant bank of a river telling Nobunaga that they don’t have much farther to go, now. It’s not an impressive sight, at least not yet, not from here. She’s seen the closest thing one can get to a bird’s eye view in this place, and it’s at the top of a nearby hill, overlooking almost every part of the landscape that river winds into.

The climb up there has the both of them breathing heavily, but it’s in the moment when they crest that peak and Okita’s eyes go wide that all of Nobunaga’s energy surges back to lift the corners of her mouth. The hand not holding Okita’s flings itself out, sweeps an arc through the air as if her fingertips could graze the treetops below.

“Well?” Nobunaga asks. “Not a bad view, eh?”

The trees cluster more densely near the river. In some places, it’s difficult to even see the river at all—though that’s in part due to the blossoms that float along the surface, drifting in fragrant, fragile clouds to settle in the water. Nobunaga prides herself on picking a good day for this; the sakura are in full bloom, and the fields ahead are burgeoning with them, now more pastel pink and white than the green they’ll be when the hot summer winds blow in from the coast.

“It’s—” Okita pauses, inhales deeply. “Wow.”

“Right? Right?” Nobunaga puffs her chest a bit. “We could also go see them up close, but I figured you probably did that back in Edo or Kyoto. It’s not everywhere you can see them all at once like this. And—” She points off to the horizon, past where the land blurs into the sky to the point where the sun hangs, and says, “We should be able to see the sunset from here, too.”

Okita takes her eyes off of the landscape, just for a second, to say, “That’s… you really thought this through.”

“Don’t sound so surprised when you say that!”

Okita giggles and stares out over the sea of petals again. Her legs begin to bend beneath her, and so Nobunaga follows her into a sitting position, still clutching her hand tight. A part of Nobunaga wishes, then, that she’d opted for lower ground, if only so that she could see how Okita looks with the sakura dancing around her with the wind, nestling in hair and folds of clothing.

There’s nothing to regret about this, though. Not with Okita still half-breathless just from the lay of the country before her, prettier than any of the flowers Nobunaga ever saw even while spring was at its height.

“This wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” Okita admits after some time, features soft and relaxed. “It’s beautiful up here.”

“Yeah,” Nobunaga says, though she only thinks to tear her eyes away from Okita just then. “It really is.”


	13. Maou & Lobo - Differences

Maou has yet to find an experience that unifies all humans, but she thinks that if one exists, it must be the giddy warmth that rises upon encounters with soft animals. This occurs to her only because even as a demon, she is not completely immune to the little thrill that quickens her pulse when she meets Chaldea’s massive resident wolf.

“Why, hello there,” she says, eyes shifting first to the wolf, then to its headless rider. “Interesting. I didn’t know they allowed pets in here.”

The wolf’s lips curl, and she thinks she hears the low rumble of a growl.

“Oh, my. I don’t think he liked that joke.” She smiles up at the rider. His missing head doesn’t bother her—it’s hardly the strangest thing she’s seen at this point, though she imagines it makes communication frustrating. Scanning for any affirmative movements, she asks, “Would he let me touch him?”

Another growl. She meets the wolf’s eyes and finds them sharp and focused. That’s when she sees it: an unexpected intelligence, reflected back at her in his shrunken pupils just as the image of her own face.

“Ah… so that’s it.” Maou’s smile drops, smooths itself into something that could almost be mistaken for gentleness. “You’re the one I should be asking, then. Apologies if I’ve offended you.”

The wolf huffs once through his nose in what might be acceptance. Either way, he neither moves his body nor his gaze from Maou as she stretches her hand forward, letting it come to rest at the point where the base of his neck broadens into his shoulders. Her hand sinks right in until it’s almost completely obscured by a thick layer of white, and when she lifts it away a bit there are a few strands of fur stuck to it, stark against the dark fabric of her glove.

Maou hadn’t kept pets in life; there had been no reason to do so. Yet for all that she claims to have been most interested in the affairs of people, few sensations match the gratification of watching an animal lower its guard, its hackles falling back to rest close to the skin.

“There, there. That’s not so bad, is it?”

The wolf turns his face away with something like a snort. Not a spurning of her advance, but a resignation to it. Somehow, she gets the feeling that he’s used to this sort of thing by now. Perhaps it’s part and parcel of being around so many people. Or perhaps he’s less bothered because he senses what Maou is—humanoid, but only in shape, at this point.

“You don’t really like humans, do you?” She drags her hand up and down his neck, fingers curved to administer slow, short scratches. The wolf doesn’t have an answer for her, nor does she expect one. In the end, he is still a beast.

Even so, she lays a few strokes up close to his ears, and he lets her, pupils seated in the corners of his eyes with a remaining measure of caution. She can’t help but smile again at the thought that this creature might be thinking her a fool at this very moment just for her indulgence.

“Well, that’s fine,” she decides, holding the wolf’s stare with as much confidence as she would any human’s. “I’ve been known to accept differences in opinion.”


	14. Maou/Okita - Scars

Maou always says that it’s best to let go of the past. Maybe she believes it, too—it seems that way just by virtue of how she carries herself. It’s with a confidence that Okita emulates, but knows she could never hope to match.

That same confidence must be what inspires Maou not to hide the reminders of her life that cling to her body, and the single reminder of her death among them: a pale line of raised skin, clean and white against the otherwise smooth plane of her lower abdomen.

Okita’s touched it before, incidental grazes of her fingertips, but not the same way she traces it now. It’s deliberate, thoughtful. It’s a question she’s never had the courage to give voice to.

Maou shifts, but not enough to dislodge Okita’s head from where it’s pillowed on her chest. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Okita says, because she supposes that’s all it is. One fleeting thought out of the many that prod the edges of her consciousness before returning to being the nothing that they are. “Your skin’s just really smooth. Do you have any idea how unfair that is?”

“Unfair?” The quiet rumble of Maou’s laugh vibrates against the side of Okita’s face. “What a funny thing to say, when you’re not even touching the smooth parts.”

“I—” Okita bites her lip, hand going still.

“You’re not going to ask how I got this, I wager,” Maou says. Okita has asked about a few of them before—a gash in her side from Anegawa, the warped exit wound in her shoulder from Nagashino—but never about the one along her stomach. She doesn’t need to; they both know where that one is from.

“Does it bother you?” she ventures instead.

“What, the scar? Or you touching it?”

Okita gives her head a little shake. She already knows neither of those things bother Maou. She says, “The way you got it.”

“Ah…” Maou goes quiet for a few moments. Those few moments are enough to make Okita’s face run hot with uncertainty, but before she can tell Maou to forget she asked, Maou answers her, “Once in a while, yes. Not often. But it’s frustrating, no? Being forced to leave the world with so much left unfinished.”

“Oh.” Okita tilts her head up just enough to meet Maou’s eyes in surprise. “I… thought you didn’t dwell on things like that.”

Maou snorts. “I don’t. Those just aren’t the sorts of things you forget completely, is all.”

Okita isn’t sure whether that makes her feel better or not. For all that she claims not to be, even the Demon King is still human enough to have something she regrets. Even she is fallible. Yet Okita stares at the proof of Maou’s self-inflicted demise and wonders how bad it is of her to think that she would still take a mark like that over the slow death that lives on in her lungs.

“But it isn’t good to sit with those thoughts for long. What has already been can’t be helped,” Maou continues, as if she knows what’s going through Okita’s mind. She draws a hand through Okita’s hair, let loose from its ribbon for once, and lids her eyes meaningfully. “You’d do well to remember that, man-slayer.”

“… Right.” Okita shifts her face down again, cheek to Maou’s chest, eyes trained to the place where her fingers are still splayed. Honnouji sits along the lines etched into Okita’s palm, just as sure as Maou’s pulse thrums in her ears, strong as the fire that she breathes. Not a contradiction so much as a trick, she thinks; neither of them are really alive anymore.

She doesn’t say anything else. She exhales through her nose, closes her eyes, and lets that fleeting thought become just what she knows it to be: nothing, nothing at all.


	15. Kippoushi & Kagetora - Shogi

If you can’t beat someone in a fight, you just have to beat them at something else.

This sentiment has gotten Kippoushi laughed at more than once. That’s fine, as far as they’re concerned; they already know they’re a fool. Still, it would be more foolish to challenge an opponent like the God of War to a proper battle when their projectiles would never meet their mark.

Thus, it makes more sense to challenge her to a shogi match instead.

“Say, what do I get if I win? These sorts of things normally come with a prize, do they not?”

Kippoushi glances up from the board, though they don’t bother to correct their posture, hunched over with their elbows to their knees and their chin balanced in the palm of one hand. Kagetora smiles at them, just as she’s been doing this whole time. It’s unnerving, though they have to wonder if she means for it to be.

They return the smile and say, “What, already that confident that you’ll beat me?”

“The only time I can imagine losing to you would be in a shooting contest,” Kagetora says.

Indeed, the only reason that Kagetora hadn’t agreed to Kippoushi’s preferred means of competition was because of her terrible aim. Kippoushi had decided not to comment on how amusing it is that Bishamonten’s avatar is capable of wielding eight different weapons at once, yet becomes useless when handed a gun. Instead, they’d acknowledged that that wouldn’t be fair; therefore, a board game was the next best solution.

“Oho, I don’t know if you’ve earned the right to be so sure just yet,” Kippoushi says, eyes dropping to scan the board again. “I admire that boldness, though. Alright, lessee… you like drinking, right? How about if you win I treat you to some sake?”

“Mm, that works just fine.” Kagetora studies the board and says, “I suppose I’ll do the same for you, if you somehow beat me.”

“I think I’d get more enjoyment out of watching you try to work a gun.”

“Hm, no.” Kagetora’s eyes narrow, smile cold. “I don’t intend to let you make a mockery out of me, one way or the other.”

Kagetora’s next move sees her pressing a tile to the board with a bit more force than necessary. Kippoushi blinks, adjusts their cap by the brim, and stares down at the play with a low whistle. They’re no stranger to strategy—for all they were derided as a buffoon, they were rarely beaten in a game of shogi, but Kagetora’s ability seems nothing to scoff at.

“Say, you’re not half bad at this. You play often?”

“Not at all, actually.”

“Eh?” Kippoushi’s head jerks up. “Wait, are you saying you agreed to a match with me without having ever played shogi?”

“I know the rules. I watched my men play it plenty of times,” Kagetora says. “I was just never invited to join.”

“Oh.” They scratch sheepishly at the base of their ponytail, unsure what to say. Although they know she wouldn’t want such a thing, empathy pulls the corners of their mouth down—they, too, know what it’s like to be unpopular. “That’s, uh, too bad.”

“It is a shame, yes. It’s a pretty enjoyable way to pass the time.” She leans forward, expectant. “And it will be even more enjoyable to win, if you’ll make your move.”

“Ah, right, right.” With a shake of their head, Kippoushi resumes the game as normal. Nothing about that should come as a surprise to them at this point. It’s not as though she’s the only one around here with few friends.

Still, perhaps it’s for that reason that they aren’t all that disappointed by their defeat, and why they can hardly see holding up their end of the bargain as much of a loss at all.


	16. Kippoushi/Okita - Gender Trouble

If Kippoushi were compensated for every time someone asked about their gender, they imagine they’d have become the wealthiest person in Japan. As it stands, they demand no compensation for the time that they waste explaining to people that it doesn’t matter—they are the Demon King, first and foremost.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Hm?” They look up from where their arm is shoved halfway into the take-out port of the vending machine. “Oh, hey Okita!” They wave with their free hand, then yank the other out, fingers curled around a cold can of coffee milk. “I mean, I guess it is kind of annoying that they keep making these things so hard to get your drink out of, even after you’ve paid for it. I almost got stuck the other day…”

Okita gives them a flat look. “I wasn’t talking about the vending machine, dummy.”

“Oh,” Kippoushi says. They stand, cock their head from side to side, and process her question again. Their mind jumps back to a few seconds before they’d bent to retrieve their purchase, a conversation that had left their thoughts almost as quickly as it had ended. “Oh! You mean, uh. The new guy who couldn’t figure out whether I’m a guy too or not.”

“Yeah, um.” Fanning both hands in front of her, Okita says, “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, really! I was going to get something out of here, but—” She cuts herself off, lip pulled into her mouth by her front teeth. “I don’t know. I guess that’s not really any of my business.”

“Eh, don’t worry about it. I’m used to it—being asked that, I mean.” They shrug. “It’s either that or people deciding I’m a man because of what they read in a book or something. There’s no helping it, at this point.”

Okita frowns. “I guess not. I’ve always just thought it was pretty rude.”

“It’s _really_ rude,” Kippoushi laughs. “But even if it bothered me, what could I do about it?”

“Not much of anything, huh…” Okita crosses her arms and lets her gaze dart off to the side. “Yeah. Nevermind, then.”

Kippoushi studies her for a moment: the creases between her brows, the twist of her mouth. They lift a hand, but she doesn’t take notice of it. She only jumps at the cold, wet press of aluminum against the side of her face, batting her hands at Kippoushi with a yelp.

“Hey—cut that out, I don’t want it!”

“Sorry, sorry.” They draw the can back and toss it between their palms. “You just look like you have something on your mind.”

“It’s nothing important,” she says with a shake of her head. “Just… I get it, is all. Except that I’m not as good at keeping my cool when I’m asked about it as you are.”

“Oh,” Kippoushi says, and then again, quiet and full of understanding, “Oh.” Because of course Okita would know what that’s like, better than most. She, like Kippoushi, was written into history as a man, and will always be remembered as such.

(_It doesn’t bother me_, she’s told them and everyone else, _history books are wrong about a lot of things._ What she’s not told everyone else is that the history books were only wrong because the people who knew her in life were, too.)

Okita grimaces. “Forget I brought it up. Like you always say, it can’t be helped, right?”

As she speaks, Kippoushi fishes around in their pocket. A few more coins and the punch of a button sends a bottle of tea clattering to the bottom of the vending machine, and they crouch to scoop it up, bringing the frown back to Okita’s lips.

“What are you…”

“You were coming over to buy something, right? And I think this is the kind you usually get.” They examine it, then shift their eyes back to Okita’s face, frozen in an expression that Kippoushi can’t read. Eyebrows raised, they extend their arm again, resting the chilled plastic against Okita’s cheek.

“I said to knock that off!” Okita snaps, swiping the bottle from them. “You could’ve just handed it to me, jeez.”

“I could’ve. But you’re cute when you get mad.” They grin. “Not that you aren’t already the cutest girl I’ve ever met.”

“You— That’s—” The flush on Okita’s face runs darker with every second her tongue fumbles. “Stop trying to flatter me, it won’t work—I don’t need you to tell me I’m cute, anyway!”

“Haha, but it’s nice to hear, right?”

Their laughter doesn’t stop, even as the soft _clunk_ of plastic against their head knocks their hat to the floor. Despite all of Okita’s protests, the lack of force behind it tells Kippoushi everything they need to know about how she feels.


	17. The Odas - Mediator

Nobunaga learned long ago, as early as her childhood, that a distant call of “Aneueeeeee!” can mean a lot of things. In her experience, none of those things are good.

The shout that follows right on its heels, then—“Auntie, Auntie! Uncle is bullying me agaaaiiin!”—can only spell disaster.

She’s steeled herself for the oncoming headache well before Nobukatsu bursts into the common room, a small box half-squished between his arms. She diverts her gaze from the TV to give him an annoyed look as he stops to wheeze, legs shaky with what could be either fear or exertion.

“What are you kicking up a fuss for this time?” she asks as she hits the pause button on the remote. “I’m in the middle of something, so this had better be good.”

“Aneue,” he gasps, hunched to plant a hand on one of his knees. “Aneue, listen, I—”

Chacha stumbles into the room then, sword drawn. There’s little doubt that she’d meant to attack Nobukatsu, but the face she makes as soon as she sees Nobunaga could deceive anyone else: lips twisted and trembling, eyes squinted to blink back the fat tears welling at their edges.

“Auntie!” she cries as she patters over, the long train of her dress dragging clumsily behind her. “Auntie, tell him to give it back!”

“Give what back?” Nobunaga sits up, mouth set in a stern line. “Have you actually started taking candy from babies or something, now?”

“I have _not_,” he says. “This wasn’t hers to begin with. Do you remember those cookies that Archer made earlier? Well—”

“I said that the last one was mine,” Chacha cuts in, “and you ignored me so that you could take it! Give it back!”

Nobukatsu’s lip curls a bit with a disdain that Nobunaga rarely gets to see from him, though she doesn’t miss the nervous sweat lining his forehead. “Oh, would you pipe down? Have some respect for your elders, you should’ve known better than to try to claim it without asking Aneue if she wanted it first.”

Chacha stamps her foot, the moisture on her eyelids looking a bit less like crocodile tears than it did before. “You’re so selfish! It’s always Auntie this, Auntie that with you—aren’t I your niece? Why don’t you ever think of me, huh?” 

The edges of Nobunaga’s frown sink lower into her face as she listens to the two of them argue. There are times when petty fights are fun to watch, but this is not one of those times; she has a show to get back to. The more Chacha yells at Nobukatsu, the more he starts to squirm, voice cracking with uncertainty even for all of his blustering. He must know as well as Nobunaga does that at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before Chacha pulls out her mask and sets the room on fire.

Slowly, begrudgingly, Nobunaga rises to her feet. Her glare silences the both of them in an instant, their eyes snapping to her expectantly.

“Nobukatsu,” Nobunaga says, patiently.

“Y-Yes, Aneue?”

“It’s a damn cookie. Just give it to her—if I wanted her sweets I’d steal them myself.”

“Ah.” Nobukatsu’s gaze flicks fast from her to Chacha and back again. Then, with a timid “Yes, Aneue,” he holds the box out for Chacha to take. She does so with a furious little “Hmph!” and a loud raspberry spat in his direction. Dress sweeping a wide circle on the floor, she pivots on her heel to march out of the room just as dramatically as she’d entered.

Nobukatsu’s head turns to follow her exit, but Nobunaga snaps her fingers at him. “Hey.”

“Uh!” He stands board-stiff, hands curling and uncurling at his sides as if he’s unsure whether he’s even allowed to wring them or not. “Did you need me for something else?”

“Not really. I was watching this, before you interrupted me,” she huffs, plopping back into the same lazy position she’d occupied before and reaching for the remote.

“Oh. Um, sorry, I was just about to go—”

“Save it.” Nobunaga holds up her free hand. “I just wanted to say… maybe it seems weird coming from me, but you should try not to pick fights with Chacha. She’s your family too, you know.”

“I…” There’s something else he wants to say, she can sense it, but he swallows whatever it is with a nod. “Right. Sorry.”

“I don’t need to hear that,” Nobunaga says with a dismissive flick of her wrist. “Go on, now, get. I’m still catching up with this.”

She doesn’t watch him leave, but she hears his retreat in quick and urgent footsteps. It’s of no concern to her what he decides to do now, though. In this life, she tries her hardest not to be her brother’s keeper.

(The ache spreading in her temples stands as proof that she’s failed step one.)


	18. Nobu/Okita - Lightweight

“Hey… Hey, Nobu.”

“Hm?”

Nobunaga glances to her side, where Okita sits with her hands cupped around a bowl of sake. She’s not drinking it, for some reason. A closer look at her face reveals the rosy tint her cheeks have taken, the faint sheen of sweat gathered beneath her bangs. Nobunaga imagines that she’s in a similar state herself—the heat boiling in her head and the skull cup on the low table, emptied no less than four times now, stand as proof of that.

“We’ve been at this for some time, huh.”

“I s’pose?” Nobunaga scoops her cup back into her hand, tips it back and forth and remembers there’s nothing left in it. “What of it?”

“How long ago did, uh.” Okita’s brows crease, and she waves a hand out at the other side of the table, a vague sweep to direct Nobunaga’s eyes around the room. “Have they been like that for a while?”

"Yup.” Drinking, as with most things, is a community activity. It only makes sense that they’d have others with them—Hijikata, Kagetora, the Sakamotos—but all of them are long gone, laid out across the floor like toppled chess pieces. Nobunaga isn’t surprised. Too many times to count, she’s been the last one left conscious among men touted to be much hardier than her. She squints, reaches around the fuzzy corners of her mind to feel for something, eyes the flask on the table as if that could tell her anything about how much time has passed. Finally, she says, “Mm, not sure for how long, though.”

“So,” Okita says, emphatically, meaningfully. Her eyes haven’t left the sake bowl. “S’just the two of us, then.”

“Yyyyep,” Nobunaga drawls. “Not too quiet for you, is it?”

“No, it’s perfect.” She shifts, folds her legs beneath her, then brings them out to her side again. With a furtive glance out of the corner of her eye, she says, “Actually, there’s… something I wanna talk to you about.”

Nobunaga sets her cup down in favor of settling her chin on her palm instead. “Oh?”

“Mhm.” Okita scoots closer, close enough that Nobunaga starts to think the flush on her cheeks is a little darker than it was before. “The thing is, Nobu, I…”

“Yeah?” Nobunaga’s pulse thrums a little louder in her ears, carried right along by the sake in her blood. “C’mon, out with it.”

“I think I might—no, I definitely, um. Yeah. I,” and she takes a deep breath, lets a clumsy hand find Nobunaga’s cheek, “love you, Nobu.”

“Oh?” The word jars out of her with a laugh, unbidden. “That so?”

Okita pouts. “What are you laughing like that for?”

“Ah, no reason, no reason! I’m not even laughing, really—”

“You are! You’re laughing at me!”

Nobunaga giggles harder at that, and at the way Okita’s face colors a shade to rival her mantle. She leans around Okita to paw at her sake bowl, nudging it away, and says, “I think maybe you’ve had enough.”

“I said quit making fun of meeee!” An open palm slaps Nobunaga’s chest in protest, all of Okita’s weight behind it. Nobunaga, unprepared to handle that weight, loses her balance and falls over, back flat to the tatami and Okita’s face smushed into the place where her collarbones branch out.

For a few breathless seconds, Okita is unresponsive. Then Nobunaga hears something muffled, uttered into the fabric of her jacket. 

“Wassat?”

Okita jerks her head up, then her body up onto her elbows, the movement wobbly as her voice is when she repeats, “You’re the worst. I was serious, y’know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Nobunaga says, because she’s heard it before, more times than she’d be able to count right now. It’s Okita who doesn’t remember saying it. She lifts a hand, brushes stray strands of Okita’s bangs from her vision. “And just so you know, the feeling’s mutual.”

“Oh.” Okita blinks, like she’s forgotten how to say anything but that. “Oh.”

Nobunaga holds her stare with unfocused eyes. Half-formed words swim to the front of her mind, none of them tangible enough for her to shape her tongue around. They’re just thoughts, really. Thoughts about telling Okita that she’s cute when she’s drunk, hair mussed and lips glossy; thoughts about asking to kiss the residual sake off of them. There’s a thought, too, about going ahead and doing it anyway.

She doesn’t. What leaves her mouth is a fond, slurred “You’re such a lightweight, Okita.”

“Nuh-uh,” Okita says with a frown. “M’fine.”

“Nah. Don’t think either of us are, uh, in our right minds right now…”

“You never are, though.”

Nobunaga barks out a laugh, equal parts surprised and amused, and before she knows it they’re both howling with it until their lungs don’t have any more of it to spare—until they’re collapsed same as everyone else in the room, warm and numb and tangled at the joints just as loose threads on Nobunaga’s jacket.


	19. Maou/Majin - Deep End

There’s a look Majin gets when she wants something. Most people don’t notice the subtle lift of her brows or the sharp focus that locks her eyes forward, but Maou knows it. She’s seen it many times, and each time has told Majin _use your words_, repeated as necessary, _because no one will know how to help you otherwise._

The same look comes over Majin as she watches the poolside. It’s a greater body of water than Maou would have ever expected to see contained, enough that from this angle it almost seems as an ocean—complete with little waves, kicked up by the multitudes who occupy it. 

“Do you want to get in?”

Majin starts. Her head turns, gaze landing almost sheepishly on the folding chair next to her where Maou lies stretched out in the sun. Maou slips her sunglasses down her nose just enough to let the question in her eyes show, and Majin is quick to glance away again.

“I do,” she says, “but I can’t.”

“Why not? You’re wearing a swimsuit.”

“I can’t,” Majin says again, and frowns down at her mostly-bare body. “I don’t know how.”

“Don’t know how…” Maou follows Majin’s stare to the water. “You mean you never learned how to swim?”

Majin shakes her head. “There was no way for me to.”

“I see. Pity.” There were plenty of people in Maou’s time who didn’t know how to swim, but she hadn’t been one of them. She remembers well the summers that she spent around the river that wound through Owari, paddling through it just as much as watching the young women who did their laundry upstream. “It’s not too late, though.”

“Huh?”

Maou removes her sunglasses entirely and sets them aside. Her sandals, too, are kicked away as she rises from her seat with a toss of her hair over her shoulders.

“What I’m saying is: would you like to learn?”

“You’d teach me?”

“Well, why not?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, or even to see if Majin has one. She takes the poolside in a few quick strides and dives into its deepest end, cutting a clean line through the water. It’s been warmed by the sun, but not as warm as she’d like it to be—a consequence of harboring fire in her body, she supposes. With a gasp, she breaches the surface again, blinking the moisture from her lashes and grinning broadly up at the concrete lip of the pool.

Majin is crouched there now, palms splayed on the ground and eyes wide. There’s that wanting again, shining clear as the light playing off of the water. In response, Maou spreads her arms out wide.

“The water’s fine, as they say,” she says, idly treading the depths. “Won’t you come join me?”

Majin hesitates. Maou won’t force her to follow; never has it been her goal to force Majin to do anything, but she senses that she won’t need to, anyway. Majin shifts, starts to rise, then drops to her knees again, and then moves to sit. Her legs extend to dip her toes in, and she flinches. Slowly, slowly, her feet submerge themselves up to the ankles, and still Maou waits with her arms outstretched, ever patient.

It takes the better part of a minute for Majin to prove Maou right, but she does. She slides the rest of her body into the pool all at once, clumsy and quick as a seal, and Maou is there to grasp her beneath the arms and keep her afloat.

“Kick your legs a bit,” she instructs, “just enough to—ah, yes, just like that. See? You’re doing fine already.”

“Ah…” Majin’s shins thump against Maou’s a couple of times before she steadies herself, eyes fixed down between them. “I think, I think I get it…”

“Not bad, right?”

Majin nods. Her hands slide up to wrap a slippery grip around Maou’s biceps, and her face lifts enough for their eyes to meet, a muted excitement blooming over it. This is an expression that Maou recognizes as well as she does desire, and one that she loves just as much.


	20. Kippoushi & Chacha - Makeover

Kippoushi has seen many a strange occurrence in the boiler room that their motley crew of acquaintances has designated as their own; among those, they wouldn’t say that their niece applying someone else’s lipstick comes even close to numbering among the strangest, but it still brings them pause when they walk in.

“Oh, Auntie!” she greets them, Majin’s cheeks squished between her fingers. “Come tell Okita-chan she looks pretty!”

To Chacha’s credit, Majin is pretty, just as much now as she always is. It becomes more apparent after Chacha lets go of Majin’s face and gestures to her, back straight with pride. Majin blinks up at them with the same neutral expression as always, though her lashes are longer and darker than they remember, her cheeks pinker, and her lips very, very red.

“Uh,” they start, a bit at a loss for words—not taken aback so much by the way she looks as they are by the realization that they’ve never prepared for a situation like this. “Right, she looks—she looks nice? Yeah.”

Majin’s tongue pokes out of her mouth to drag over her upper lip.

“Ah, ah, ah—don’t do that!” Chacha chides, hand cupping Majin’s chin again. “You’ll mess it up, you know? And that’s not edible, anyway.”

“It doesn’t taste very good,” Majin says.

“I just said that you’re not supposed to eat it!”

“Do you think maybe you’re layering it on a bit heavy?” Kippoushi asks. “I mean…”

Chacha stops, hand still poised before Majin’s mouth to reapply the smeared lipstick. “Are you going to tell me that I did a bad job?”

“Huh? No, it doesn’t look bad or anything, it’s just—” _It’s caked on a little thick_, they want to say, but the steel in Chacha’s eyes is enough to make them swallow it back. In more ways than one, she’s as much a child at heart as she is a stubborn mother. “Nothing. It looks just fine,” they settle on instead.

Chacha’s expression smooths itself out. “As expected! Any noble woman worth her money knows how to pretty herself up.” She dabs meticulously at the corners of Majin’s lips, then stops to grin wider at Kippoushi. “Oh, Auntie, you should let me do yours, too!”

“My. My what?” Kippoushi balks. Their fingers lift to worry the well-worn brim of their cap. “Chacha, look, I’m not…”

“Not what?” Chacha’s head tilts. “Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to be pretty.”

But they haven’t, really. Maintaining their guns has always appealed to them far more than maintaining their appearance. That, too, earned them a derision reserved only for fools, but they never cared about that.

Their niece is a different matter, though. She stares at them with round, expectant eyes, and they know that she won’t make fun of them regardless of what they tell her. If they say no to her, she’ll just be disappointed, and that’s a far worse thing to deal with than any amount of ridicule that they’re used to.

“Well…” They sigh, lick their lips, and try to curve them into a smile. “I guess it won’t hurt to try it, at least.”

“Yay!” Chacha separates herself from Majin at last, who immediately moves to scratch away some of the foundation on her cheek. Chacha takes no notice of that, though. She’s already up on her feet, hand around Kippoushi’s wrist to drag them down to sit. “Just you wait, I’m gonna make you look soooo good that all the girls in Chaldea will be jealous.”

“Uh-huh…”

Still, in spite of their doubt and the points where Chacha nearly pokes their eye out with her eyeliner pen, they suppose that it isn’t all that bad. A small price to pay, as it were, for how pleased with herself she looks afterwards.


	21. Kippoushi & Nobukatsu - First Aid

“Fussy” is not a word Kippoushi would ever have used to describe their brother—at least, not the version of him that they’d known. The one who exists in Chaldea is much different than they remember; around this Nobukatsu, it’s the only word that comes to mind.

It’s all they can think when he tugs a roll of bandages around their upper arm, the whole time stumbling through a ramble about how “You really should be more careful, I know you’ve always been the strongest but at least try not to get hurt…”

“It’s just a scratch,” Kippoushi laughs, a bit awkwardly, “seriously, I get way more banged up than this all the time. Are you trying to stand in for Mother, now?”

“No, I just—” Nobukatsu shakes his head and pulls the gauze a bit tighter. “I know you can handle yourself, but I can’t help worrying about you sometimes. Isn’t it a brother’s job to worry?”

It hadn’t been while they were alive, not really, but Kippoushi doesn’t point that out. They don’t point out the fact that they’re not the big sister Nobukatsu remembers, either; there’s no reason to kill that earnest look in his eyes the same way the rest of their family did. It’s not that they think Nobukatsu doesn’t know. They’re certain he does, but to hear it given a voice would sound the same as a rejection to him.

Instead, they say carefully, “I think I’d like it better if you worried more about yourself.”

“I’m fine, really!” Nobukatsu insists. “I don’t climb trees or anything, anyway.”

Kippoushi’s latest exploit is indeed the cause for the nasty gash across their left biceps, bleeding from a tumble down a tree and skin scraped away on the rough knot of a branch. Even so, they laugh, “That isn’t the point, dummy. I meant in general.”

“I take perfectly good care of myself.”

“That why you keep first aid supplies on you all the time?”

“Well.” Nobukatsu ties off the bandage and stuffs the rest of the roll into the pouch that hangs off his belt. He knows as well as Kippoushi does that such things are useless for spirits to hang onto for many reasons, the least of which is the fact that they’re not on a battlefield now. Nobukatsu’s invited into simulations, but not proper battlefields—another thing they’ve chosen not to speak of. He smiles, strained at the corners, and says, “It can’t hurt to be prepared, right?”

“Trust me, I know,” they say as they look over the strip of white around their arm, tight enough that it almost hurts when they flex. “I’m just saying that if you’re gonna be prepared, it’s good to be looking out for number one, y’know?”

“Ah, but really, I’m not…”

And he doesn’t finish the sentence, but Kippoushi knows what was going to come next. It’s the reason he’s followed them around all this time, even aware as he must be that they’re not quite the big sister he devotes himself to. In Nobunaga’s absence, he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He’s lived so long in her shadow that it’s become the only home he has.

“Well, I guess I’ll do that for you, then,” Kippoushi finally says, with the biggest smile they can muster.

Any protests Nobukatsu could make are frozen before they’re even formed, replaced with a “Huh?”

“What I’m saying is—” They bring a hand to rest atop Nobukatsu’s cap, displacing the hair beneath it. “Aren’t older sisters supposed to worry about their little brothers, too?”

Nobukatsu doesn’t have a counterargument or even an expression of gratitude to offer up for that, but he doesn’t need one. The moisture that clings to the corners of his eyes tells Kippoushi everything they need to know.


	22. Maou & Mori - Tea Time

Tea time with his lord has always been a casual affair for Mori. If asked, he’d say that’s simply the kind of person she is—it doesn’t matter what form she assumes. The tall, imposing Demon King whom most shy away from in the halls still sits the exact same way that the short woman who could fit atop one of his shoulders does: legs apart, one knee up, and chin lowered lazily into one of her hands.

“So, Li Shuwen won’t be joining you this time?” she asks, free hand tapping an uneven rhythm onto the low table.

“Hah?” Mori glances up, kettle poised over a cup of matcha powder. “Oh, right. Yeah, that geezer said somethin’ about being busy with his own lord, and how he figured I’d understand.” Hot water pours from spout to cup in a puff of steam, and he flashes her a grin. “And I guess I do, actually. Ha!” 

Maou returns his smile indulgently. “I’m not your lord anymore, though.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s pretty funny, bein’ on the same level as you.”

“Mm, I wouldn’t go that far.”

Mori laughs as he sets the kettle aside. At the end of the day, his previous lord is just as prideful as he remembers. That doesn’t bother him; just for that, if nothing else, she’ll always have his respect.

“And what about the others? Kinda weird to see ya without that little brother of yours hanging off of ya.”

She frowns, brows setting at the angle they always did to betray the beginnings of a headache. “Is that so. Well, he’s not in the mood to materialize, it seems, or else I’m sure he’d be along to bother us.”

“Bother, huh? That’s pretty cold!” Mori shakes his head in time with the slow whirls of his tea whisk. “But I know you don’t really feel that way, Ootono.”

“Katsuzou,” she says, “don’t think that just because we’re on equal footing now that you’re free to say whatever you want.”

Mori’s not afraid of her—never has been, because he knows she’d rather not fight him even if she thought she could win. Even so, he defers with an insincere “Haha, sorry!” and, as if by way of apology, slides one cup of freshly mixed tea over to her. She accepts it with a roll of her eyes, and he considers it a slip of the tongue forgiven.

“I do think this kinda thing’s better with more company, though,” he continues, pulling his own cup close between both of his hands. “Makes me wish we had Naritoshi here, too.”

“Getting nostalgic?” Maou hums. “That’s not like you.”

“But you don’t disagree or anythin’, yeah?”

Such impudence would have seen a lesser man burnt to a crisp ten times over. In Mori’s presence, Maou only lets out a soft sigh through her nose, and the lines age has etched into her skin seem just a bit deeper. Her face itself betrays no emotion, but her eyes have never lied, and right now there’s a fondness in them that she’s never reserved for anyone but family. Mori had never been the recipient of it, but he’d seen it trail after his little brother in much the same way she trains it on her own, now, when she thinks no one is watching.

“No, I suppose not,” she admits at last. She takes a slow drink of her tea, eyes closing. “At any rate, a table like this does feel a little too big with so much space unfilled.”

“I’ll make sure I drag the old man along next time, then.”

Maou chuckles and wipes the froth from her upper lip. “Well, that’s just fine,” she says, and Mori doesn’t need to ask to know what she thinks is missing. “The more, the merrier.”


	23. Maou/Okita - Hot Spring

The air in a hot spring has always felt different to Okita. Humidity is no good for her condition, she’s been told, but the warmth that curls around her the moment she steps out from wooden doorstep to cobblestone is nothing short of cleansing. She breathes it in, feels it seep into her skin and unwind the muscles between her shoulders, and smiles to herself. It’s been too long since she last got a chance to do this.

As she walks toward the spring ahead, though, she hears a ripple in the water, and she freezes. It seems she’s not quite as alone here as she’d expected to be.

“Hm?” a voice cuts through the thin clouds of steam that hang close to the water’s surface. “Oh, did you come to join me, man-slayer?”

Even without the shock of red hair that accompanies it, Okita would recognize that voice anywhere. She narrows her eyes—she’d hoped to stake the area out while it was at its emptiest, but she’s already been beaten to it. She would leave without a second thought if doing so didn’t feel in some way like admitting defeat.

“Not specifically to join you,” Okita huffs. She keeps her eyes deliberately turned away from Maou as she approaches. “I just thought I’d take some time to myself here, too.”

“Is that so? Well, don’t let me ruin it for you.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

Okita sheds her towel and folds it to set it close to the lip of the spring. Goosebumps rise in patches over the newly exposed skin, though she thinks it less because of the caress of steam in the air and more due to the burn of Maou’s gaze, which she can tell is trained on her even without glancing up. That’s all the more reason for her to hasten her descent into the water, slipping into the opposite end of the pool feet-first.

The heat sinks in up to her collarbones, causes her to hiss at first. It’s hotter than she’d thought it would be. She hears Maou chuckle from several feet away, and finally tears her eyes from the decorative rocks patterned outside the water to glare at her. Maou grins wide, back leaned against the side of the spring and arms spread across the edge, bent at the elbows.

“What, too hot for you?”

“This is your fault, isn’t it,” Okita says. She lets a finger breach the surface to point accusingly. “I was wondering why there was so much steam in the air, but that’s gotta be you. You’re making it hotter than it needs to be!”

Maou rolls her shoulders in a lazy shrug. “I can’t really help that.”

“Yes you can. You’re totally making your body too hot on purpose.”

“Is that what you think?” Maou tilts her head, eyes wrinkled at the corners. “That’s an odd way to proposition me.”

“Proposi—” Okita’s voice cracks, and in that moment it’s as if all the spring’s heat has channeled itself into her veins, into her face. “I’m not—that’s not what I’m doing at all, you, you—!”

Almost on instinct, her arms shove themselves forward, sending up a small wave with them. Maou sputters with the force of it, and by the time it’s receded she’s drenched, face and hair and all. Her smile, too, seems as though it’s been washed away entirely. Okita can’t help the snort she lets out at that.

“So that’s how it’s going to be, is it.” The temperature of the water almost seems to rise in time with the slant of her brows and the lift of her shoulders, her body drawing itself up more. “Very well, then.”

Okita isn’t given time to react. A splash of nearly scalding water is sent up in her direction, and all she can do is close her eyes against it, hands raised in a weak attempt at defense.

“Ah, wait wait wait, my ribbon, I forgot to take it out—”

“Well, perhaps you should’ve thought about that before challenging me!”

“I wasn’t—” Another dash of water fills her mouth, and she spits it up with an indignant shout. “Oh, that is _it_!”

In a way, it’s for the best that no one is around to mediate; otherwise they might slip on the torrents of water splashed up onto the stones paving a path to it. As it stands, no one is around to witness the spat that follows, nor the inexplicable result of it: Okita with an angry, unsteady grip on Maou’s biceps, locked in an unsuccessful struggle to shove her beneath the surface altogether.

It’s not that she lacks the strength to do it. It’s the embarrassment that sets in seconds later, saps the will to continue from her muscles, and forces her to compromise by shoving Maou away entirely. She scrambles again for the other side of the spring, this time to pull herself out, and Maou lets her go with a laugh.

“Giving up already? That’s not like you, Okita.”

Okita doesn’t dignify her with a response or even another look in her direction. It’s not that she’s angry. Her face burns with something else, something that she refuses to admit to in a place like this.

When she wraps herself back in her towel, it’s to make herself decent as much as it is to ward off the chill that she tells herself is just the way the air feels after the spring. It has nothing to do with the way that Maou said her name, nor the peal of her laugh that follows her well after she’s retreated into the inn.


	24. Nobu/MHX - Tone Deaf

“Okay, how’s this sound?”

X looks up at Nobunaga, noodles hanging halfway out of her mouth. Nobunaga sits across from her, that absurd guitar propped up on her lap, and teases a few chords out of its strings. It’s a mere opening riff, but Nobunaga seems pleased with herself afterwards, back straight and smile wide.

X remembers she’s supposed to have an opinion to give, and swallows. “Mm, right, yes. That’s good.”

“Right? Right?” Nobunaga paws for the notebook she’d set on the table, carefully away from her bowl of ramen, and scribbles something down in it. “So I think that can be the intro _and_ the outro… and…”

“Um, if you don’t mind me asking.” X gestures in Nobunaga’s direction with her chopsticks. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Working on a new single, duh.” She holds up the notebook that she’s been writing in since they ordered, the movements of her pencil so frenzied that X had thought she might burn a hole through the page. “I’ve already got the lyrics down and everything, but I need a tune to set them to.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Here, I’ll let you get a sneak peek, since you’re my partner and all.” She slides her notes across the table with a wink, then leans into the back of the booth, arms crossed.

X takes the notebook with a brow raised. She wants to point out that it’s not much of a sneak peek if the whole restaurant can hear, but a glance around reminds her that it’s almost entirely empty. That’s for the best, she thinks; if there were enough people around to be bothered by the noise, the two of them would surely get kicked out, and X is only on her second bowl of tonkatsu.

The notes are messy and disjointed—not because of Nobunaga’s handwriting, for that’s surprisingly legible, but because they’re all over the place. The margins around the page and between stanzas are littered with crossed-out addendums and musical jargon that X doesn’t understand. It takes her a moment to even find what the lyrics are supposed to be, and when she does, her brows knit.

“These are, um…”

“Yes?” Nobunaga asks, leaning forward. “Whaddya think? It’s kinda experimental, but it’s pretty good, right?”

“Good” would perhaps be too generous a word to use. X has heard Nobunaga practice many times now, and as with all those times before, the lyrics are complete nonsense.

“Well, they’re definitely, ah. Creative? Yes, very creative.”

“Hah, I thought so, too!” She takes the notebook back and picks up her pencil again. “I’m trying for a different angle this time, see. Songs about death by fire are all well and good, but people aren’t ready for those yet. I figured that’s why the last album kinda flopped.”

“R-Right…”

“So I thought, y'know what—” She snaps her fingers, “I’ve got it! I should appeal to my cute side more. People eat that right up!”

_So that’s what that was supposed to be…_ X thoughtfully pulls more noodles into her mouth and says, “Well, you’re already cute, so I don’t think you need to put in all that effort to pull it off.”

“Oh.” Nobunaga’s grin only falters momentarily, but her cheeks have more color in them than they did before. “Oh! I mean—of course I am, I knew that already. I just need to channel it more, you know? Because personally, I think I’m more cool, most of the time.”

“Mm, very.”

There’s no sarcasm in X’s agreement. Nobunaga is indeed very cool, but perhaps not in the way that she herself thinks. She returns to reviewing her notes, tongue poking from a corner of her mouth, and X reflects again that if nothing else, Nobunaga is admirable for the audacity it takes to keep creating albums that don’t sell.


	25. Kippoushi/Majin - Red Ribbon

“Hey, Majin, wait up!”

At the sound of her name, Majin turns to see Kippoushi jogging up to her, arm waving to get her attention.

“Oh, it’s just you,” Majin says, but not out of disappointment. Her voice is warm, and though it’s difficult for her to command such an expression, she tries for a smile. “What is it?”

They come to a stop in front of her, and that’s when Majin notices that their fist is closed around something. Their fingers uncurl to present it: a thin red ribbon with tassels at its ends, unmistakably hers.

“Did you drop this? It looks like it’s yours,” they say. Their eyes skim her as if to place where the ribbon could’ve come from. There are several places where similar ones are tied—on her scabbard, on her armor.

“Ah—” On instinct, Majin’s hands lift to the sides of her head. One ribbon is still knotted faithfully in place, but on her right side, her fingers slide through her hair with no resistance. “Yes, I think that is mine. It must have slipped out of my hair somehow…”

“No worries, I can put it back in for you,” Kippoushi says. They step closer, eyes meeting Majin’s as if to check for any signs of protest, but all Majin gives them is a nod of assent. Confident now that they have her permission, they examine the loose locks that fall close to her face, brows knitted. “Lessee… I’m pretty sure it goes like, uh…”

Majin patiently watches them fumble, standing still as stone as their fingers slip beneath a lock of her hair. She feels them loop the ribbon around it, but she can’t see what shape it takes after that; she can only try to guess by the furrow of their brows, the way their eyes continue to dart to the other side of her head, and the slightly aggravated twisting against her temple.

“Uh,” they say. “Uh, hold on, I think I’ve… almost got it? Maybe.”

Majin shifts. If told to, she could very well stand there all day, but she doesn’t particularly want to. She doesn’t think Kippoushi wants to, either.

“Here,” she says after another minute or so of this, “if I may…”

She brings her hands up to grasp theirs. They’re warm, bigger than hers and callused from palms to fingertips. For a moment, she nearly forgets herself, caught up in the urge to run her thumbs over their knuckles just to see what they feel like. It takes her a second to shake herself out of it and move them aside entirely, fingers replacing theirs in her hair.

“Like this,” she says with a glance out of the corner of her eye to check that they’re watching. Practice has made her movements quick; in a matter of seconds, she’s curled the ribbon into its three-tiered shape and secured it around a strand of her hair.

“Wow, you can do that without a mirror?” Kippoushi asks, pushing the brim of their cap higher with their thumb. Their face is a bit pinker than normal, Majin notes. Perhaps they’re embarrassed.

“Ah, it took me a while to get it, too,” she assures them. On impulse, her hand finds theirs again, an excuse to give it a grateful squeeze. “In any case, thank you for finding it for me. I’m not sure what I’d do without it.”

“Oh, uh.” Their cap is pulled down again, almost enough that she can no longer see their eyes. “No problem? If it’s that important…”

“Of course. Red is my favorite color, you know.”

Kippoushi doesn’t have a response to that, but Majin doesn’t wait for one. With some reluctance, she lets go of their hand, gives them one last try at a smile, and resumes her walk down the hall. She doesn’t remember where she was going, but she supposes it doesn’t matter now; her mind is more occupied with the roughness she’d felt in their hands, and the color she’d seen their cheeks fill with when she’d held them.


	26. Nobu & Hijikata - Truce

Nobunaga and Hijikata have an unspoken agreement: they’re not to fight if Okita is in the room.

Certainly, Okita could mediate before too much damage is done. Nobunaga can call to mind many times Okita has had to step between the two of them before weapons are pulled, but it's the heavy weight of disapproval in her eyes, in the sunken corners of her mouth, that Nobunaga disdains. She'd long thought herself immune to guilt, but she feels something close to it after enough instances where Okita had to pry two people she cares about out of a grapple.

Hijikata, on the other hand, never feels bad about anything. Nobunaga can tell by the steel in his eyes, cold and unbending, and can almost respect that about him. There is only one matter they share the same opinion on: Okita should direct her energy to more worthwhile things off the battlefield than their petty squabbles, and so they arrive at a reluctant truce when either Okita or their Master is present.

It is when there is no mediator that relations are at their most dangerous. When Nobunaga walks into the boiler room to find Hijikata already there, she has to wonder whether it's a mere matter of time before a conflict breaks out.

"Hey, Hiji!" she greets him—her best attempt at being amicable.

It doesn't work. He only gives her an irritated glance out of the corner of his eye before biting back into his takuan, a tad more aggressively than necessary. That's about the outcome that she'd expected, so she doesn't let it bother her; instead, she saunters right up to the kotatsu and plops herself down in front of it, tangerine in hand.

"Not in the mood to talk, I see." She pulls off one of her gloves with her teeth, speaking around it. "That's fine."

He crunches his takuan louder. "What do you want, Oda."

"Oh, nothing. Just came in here 'cause I thought it'd be a quiet place to have a little snack, but I guess not."

Hijikata snorts. "If you're that disappointed, leave."

"Disappointed? I have no idea what you're talking about." She drives her bare thumb into the center of the tangerine, digging beneath its skin, and flashes him a grin around the fabric caught in her teeth. "I'm always happy to see my good friend Hijikata."

"We're not friends."

"Aw, there's no need to be so cold, is there?" Hijikata looks over the kotatsu at her as though she were a fly that just landed on it, and she huffs, abandoning her friendly guise. Her glove is dropped onto the kotatsu along with a shred of tangerine peel clumsily torn away. "Well, fine. I'm not leaving, though."

All he gives her is a grunt of what she assumes is displeasure. He'll just have to deal with that, she supposes. For now, she scatters citrus rind on the wood grain, and as long as her hands are busy she manages to pretend that the silence isn't laden with tension.

It's when her hands are no longer occupied, when she's separated the tangerine into sections and arranged them on the kotatsu, that she deems the quiet as unbearable as the effort she puts into not making him angry. She slips a tangerine slice into her cheek, bleeds its juice out between her molars, and breathes in sharp through her nose. Maybe she should've just left, but doing so would make her feel like she'd lost before a fight even arose.

"Hey," she says, impulsively, "are you really gonna eat through that whole jar? That might as well be a meal. You could at least make it into, like, onigiri, or..."

"Hmph. Not a bad idea, coming from you. But this isn't a meal," he says—the most he's said since she entered. "It's a pretty small ration. Maybe not for someone of your size, though."

"Oh, please. I can stomach plenty." As if to prove her point, she grabs for a slice with her gloveless hand and takes a bite of it before he can say anything. "Mmph—heh, only problem is that it's not good enough to eat on its own—ack!"

She's at eye level with Hijikata before she can get another word in, legs dangling just above the kotatsu's surface. Her hands scrabble for a grip on his forearm. She half expects him to drop her, the only thing keeping her suspended his fist curled in the front of her jacket. He squints at her, lip curled as though he might really spit venom into her face. She's sure he would, if he could.

His vitriol seeps into his words instead: "Don't. Eat. My. Food."

"Your food sucks anyway," she puffs out, almost a laugh. "Is this really what you're willing to fight me over? I don't think Okita would—"

"Don't talk about her to me."

"And why not? Why shouldn't I talk about my girlfriend, hm?"

"Oda."

"That's me!" Nobunaga grins, all teeth. "S'not what Okita calls me, though. 'Nobu' is normally what I hear from her when I—"

Hijikata doesn't drop her so much as toss her, as easily as he might a cat by its scruff. She doesn't quite land on a wall-mounted shelf; it's more like she crashes onto it en route to the wall, bringing it and the decorative pots placed on it down with her. She can only imagine how ungraceful her landing is, because she makes it to the ground head-first and slumps there awkwardly in the clutter her body created, vision still tilted.

She hears the door slam to the side. "What in the—Nobu?!"

Nobunaga can't quite make out who the figure in the doorway is, but she doesn't need to. She lifts a hand in a dazed wave and says, "Ah, hey, Okita. Good timing."

And it is good timing, truly. It's only a shame that it fell to Okita once again to prevent further destruction.

Okita is yelling something that Nobunaga has long since lost her focus enough to listen to, but she doesn't need a lecture to have learned a lesson: perhaps sometimes it really is better to flee the battlefield before the fighting starts.


	27. Maou/Majin - Mantle

It's not a rule that no one is allowed to touch Maou's cape, necessarily, but it might as well be one. In her lifetime, few had ever gotten close enough to touch any part of her in the first place, and if they did so without her permission they'd be little more than a smear of cinders on the floor in seconds.

It comes as a surprise, then, when she feels a tug on said mantle out of nowhere, urgent and meek. She stops and turns, lips curved sharply downward and palms crackling with warning sparks, only to be met with a pair of familiar and innocent eyes.

"Majin," she says, flames dying on her hands before they can even flare. "What is it?"

Even more unexpectedly, Majin brings a finger to her lips with a pleading "Shhh!" Maou can only blink in confusion as Majin glances behind her, then lifts a corner of the mantle and ducks beneath it, body attempting to mold itself to Maou's.

"What on Earth are you—" she starts to ask, only to be cut off by another shushing noise. At that, she sets her shoulders more sternly. "Majin," she says, tone harder, because her patience can extend itself many times over for the Devil Saber in a way that it won't for others, but even that has its limits.

It's not Majin who answers her, but the echo of Majin's nickname from farther down the hall, pitchy and familiar. Majin's body goes stiff behind hers, and Maou's brows lift.

"Oh, Auntie!" Chacha bounds up to her, dress flouncing with every step. "Have you seen Okita-chan anywhere? I've been looking for her since breakfast this morning, but I haven't seen a hair of her and I'm starting to get worried..."

Maou finds herself at a rare loss for words. If Chacha has been seeking Majin out with no success, that can only mean that Majin doesn't want to be found. Majin's current hiding place, dangerously close, is proof enough of that.

_Can she really not see Majin now? There's no way she can't notice. There's no way._

"No," she says after a few moments, clearing her throat. "But I'll let you know if I find her."

Chacha's mouth twists a bit in disappointment. "Aww..."

Maou is more acutely aware than ever of the head nestled between her shoulder blades, the hands tucked in close to her spine. She asks, "Have you tried asking Ritsuka? They'd know better than I would, I imagine."

"Oh!" Chacha's head lifts sharply. "Why didn't I think of that? Thanks, Auntie!"

With a wave, Chacha's off down the hall again with her usual vigor, and Maou attempts to peer over her shoulder even though she knows she won't be able to see what's behind her.

"All right, Majin, you can come out now."

Majin slinks out enough for Maou to see her face, but she doesn't draw her body away completely, the edge of the fabric still draped around her shoulders. Her eyes track to the hallway that Chacha disappeared down, then back to Maou, her posture relaxing with a timid, "Thank you."

"No need. I'm just amazed she didn't see you," Maou says. Her arms cross over her chest. "Are you going to tell me why you’re hiding from my niece?"

Majin's eyes drift sheepishly to the ground. "Chacha is kind to me, but... She was trying to make me eat something I didn't like earlier. So I ran away."

"Why is she making you eat things if you don't like them?"

"She said something about it being good for me. But I don't want it. I'm perfectly healthy."

"That you are," Maou says, head tilted, "but she's probably forgotten about that by now. You should at least go give her one less reason to worry."

"Oh..." Majin frowns and tucks the lower half of her face farther into her scarf. "I suppose."

"And you should also let go of my mantle at some point, too."

"But I like it under there. It's warm." As if for emphasis, she retreats farther under it again, up to that strand of hair that refuses to be combed down.

"Majin." When Majin's head pokes out again, cautious, Maou rests a hand atop it and gives her a smile, her fondness measured in the strain on her cheeks. "Come on, now. Would it make you feel better if I went with you?"

Majin is quiet, fists balling tighter in the red silk between her fingers. "Yes, please."

"Well, then, let's go," Maou says. She doesn't make an effort to pull Majin along, because she doesn’t need to. Faithful as a dog, Majin will always follow—and, true to Maou's summation of her, Majin does remain close to her heels as they walk together, never once letting go of her mantle.


	28. Mori & Kippoushi - Bloodbath

“Hey, is. Is that your blood?”

“Hah?” Mori follows Kippoushi’s line of sight down to the ivory plates of his armor, stained beyond recognition with ugly splashes of maroon. “Oh, this? Nah—well, some of it probably is, actually. But I bet most of it isn’t!”

He tosses his head back with a loud laugh, but Kippoushi doesn’t mirror it. They watch him instead with an odd furrow in their brow, mouth twisted into a pensive shape. Mori’s cackling dies short, as always, like it had been cut straight from the root, and he reaches for his helmet as if taking it off will let him get a better look at his former lord.

“What’s that look for, Ootono?” he asks, shaking the sweat from his matted hair. “It’s not anythin’ you should be worried about.”

“Worried?” Kippoushi waves as if to brush the statement off. “Nah, I know you can handle yourself in a fight, Katsuzou. But some of that looks pretty fresh.”

“Well, yeah, ‘cause I was just out with Master.” He drags his free hand over his chest plate, smearing some of the stains there—fresh, indeed. “Most of it’s dry, though. I was tellin’ Master a little while back that I get so much of it on me that it’s a pain to wipe off, so I just don’t.”

Kippoushi should know that about Mori better than anyone else, he thinks. He cocks his head and tries to recall whether the lord he remembers had said anything to him about the way he’d come back from battlefields soaked head to toe in blood, all the more triumphant for it. He thinks she might have said something about how he should be more concerned about taking real baths than walking around painted with proof of his enemies’ demise.

Kippoushi, too, says, “That’s… uh, worse, I think.”

“Why? It’s like wearin’ proof of all my high scores.”

“Yeah, but…” Kippoushi’s eyes drift up to his face, where he can feel blood drying on his face, caked in his hair. “Say, Katsuzou. You shower, right?”

“Shower? You mean like a rain shower? Sure, I take those all the time.”

“No, I meant.” The crease between Kippoushi’s brows deepens. “Okay, how about a bath? You take those, right?”

“Oh. 'Course I do, 'course I do! Gotta be clean when you take tea, right? Sen no Rikyu was always tellin’ me that.” He grins. “And if I don’t have time for a bath then a dunk in a river or something is fine, right?”

For reasons Mori can’t fathom, Kippoushi’s expression twists for a second as if they’d just opened the fridge to rancid leftovers. They’re quick to clear it, hand coming up to rub their chin like that could massage the tension out of it.

“All right then,” they say, “Whaddya say we go take a dip in a river right now?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. C'mon, it’ll be fun!”

And Mori, never one to turn down the promise of fun, sees no reason to reject the offer—nor the relief in Kippoushi’s eyes when he says, “Sure, Ootono, whatever you say!”


	29. Kippoushi/Okita - Snow

At Chaldea’s original location, Kippoushi is told, snow had been no grand affair. People saw it all the time from the observatory windows: a constant, unrelenting blizzard, not a green thing to be found year in and year out. It’s no surprise everyone had gotten used to it, then. Kippoushi can imagine how tired of it they’d get if it was all they ever got to see.

The place that they’re summoned to has no view of the outside to begin with. If it ever snows beyond their base in the Wandering Sea, they don’t know about it, and so the changing of the seasons remains the novelty that it is, and snow is still the temporary playground that they remember it to be.

“Whew—was starting to forget what cold felt like!” they say, stomping a hole into the pristine white beneath their feet until it coats their shin, icy grains clinging to their boots.

“What are you so excited about?” Okita asks. “It’s just snow.”

“I mean, it’s been a long time since we were last sent somewhere there was any, right?”

“I suppose?” She toes at it with her boot. Servants don’t suffer too badly from cold, but she’s still traded out her haori for her more practical hakama, her scarf the only part of her usual outfit that she kept. “It’s not that I hate it, but…”

“Not a fan of getting cold, then?”

“Well,” Okita tucks the loose fringes of her hair behind one ear and huffs, sending a short-lived cloud up into the chill, “I don’t love or hate it. It just is what it is.”

“Fair enough.” Kippoushi hasn’t dressed up for the weather at all, their midriff and left shoulder still bare, but it doesn’t bother them in the slightest. If anything, the chill that seeps into their blood, stings their lungs with every breath they take, is invigorating. “I think we might as well enjoy it, though.”

“You always want to goof off,” Okita says with a roll of her eyes.

“And what’s the matter with that?”

“Sometimes you have to get serious, and I know that you can if you put your mind to it.” She turns, starting off in the direction that the rest of their team has gathered around their Master. “Come on. If you wanna act like a kid, I’m sure Master’ll let you play in the snow when we’re done.”

The one thought in Kippoushi’s mind as they stare at the fraying edges of Okita’s scarf can only be described as childish, indeed. They bend to scoop up a palmful of snow, cold and wet between the callused creases of their fingers. It only takes a couple of strides for them to clear the distance between themselves and Okita, and too little time for her to react to the sensation of her scarf being tugged back, a little mound of slush unceremoniously dumped onto the nape of her neck.

The screech that erupts at the contact is enough to make heads turn from up ahead. Okita whirls, her face a bright red and her hand on the hilt of her sword.

Kippoushi isn’t afraid of Okita, not in the slightest, but they remember something they’ve been told before, something about how there’s nothing more formidable than a woman whose pride has been wounded. They know before she’s even advanced a step towards them to break into a run, away from her furious blustering and the shouts of the others—bounding through untrodden snowdrifts and, as if they really were a child again, laughing all the way.


	30. Maou/Okita - River of Heaven

There's no moon out tonight. The plains of Owari are darker for it, no glow to reflect off of the rippling tides of grass and the rivers that cut through them, but it's not so pitch that Okita can't see. The stars that glitter overhead are still enough to illuminate the figure who stands ahead, cutting a tall silhouette against the field before her.

"What are you doing out here?"

She knows who this is, even before the figure turns her head. The Demon King's stance is as much a giveaway to her identity as the golden rays that extend from her mantle as though she were the sun itself. As Okita approaches, she makes out the beginning of a smile on Maou's features, unduly relaxed.

"I think I could ask you the same question, man-slayer."

"I asked you first, though."

Maou lets out a laugh like the breeze that ruffles Okita's hair, smooth and low. "Fair enough," she says, but rather than answering she tilts her head up again to survey the sky. "Do you know any constellations?"

"Uhhh." Okita follows Maou's line of sight, confused, wondering if there's something up there that she should see. "A couple? I know about the Celestial Market... and Orihime and Hikoboshi. Why do you ask?"

"No particular reason. It's just that they're much easier to see on nights like tonight. There, look," and she points somewhere far ahead, drawing Okita's eyes to the broad cluster of stars that carve a silvery path through the ink of the sky—the River of Heaven. "You can't even see the river that separates Orihime and Hikoboshi, if the moon's out. In the West they call it the Milky Way."

"I see." Okita's brow furrows. She won't disagree that it's a sight to behold. The more she stares at the boundless canopy above them, the more she feels like she could fall up into that river and the vastness that surrounds it, let it carry her up to the place she'd always thought the dead should go. "But. Why are you telling me this?"

"Like I said, do I need a reason for it? Sometimes you can just take a moment to appreciate things without thinking too deeply about them." Her gaze breaks from the sky to look down at Okita instead. As if she knows exactly how small Okita feels, she says, "Humans have all wondered the same thing: how they might reach the heavens one day, as they've already conquered the Earth."

"In the present, people are trying to do that," Okita says. "They've gone up to the moon already, apparently. Didn't find any mochi, though, so what was the point."

Maou laughs again, fuller this time. "It was all just to prove that they could, obviously! Tell humans that something is impossible, and they won't stand for it." Okita doesn't miss how Maou says "they," as though she's any different. "If you'd told me while I was alive that people would one day be able to fly like birds, even I may have had trouble believing it. But, with time, the definition of what's impossible always changes."

"I guess..."

Maou shifts, and Okita finally tears her eyes away from that dizzying view to watch her seat herself cross-legged on the ground. She doesn't know what else to say. Her head is still spinning around everything Maou told her, as if the world's own gravity were pulling on it.

Maou spares her the trouble of speaking by sweeping a corner of her mantle aside. "You're welcome to join me, you know. I don't bite," she says, though the way her eyes gleam leads Okita to believe otherwise. "Or don't. Whichever you prefer."

The rational response, as it often is with Maou, would probably be to walk away. Okita, as she has more and more often, decides to come closer instead, settling down next to her with her legs stretched out in the cool grass. Maou flashes her a smile, then turns it back up to the stars, shining as bright as they ever will before the moon returns to obfuscate them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that concludes this little challenge... i might do something like this again in the future, but i don't usually post collections like these, and for now i need a break, haha.
> 
> if you read these, even just a few, thank you! i hope i helped spread the nobu love some.


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